Monarchs, like other insects with complete metamorphosis, undergo a development process that appears to be very different from that undergone by humans. They go through stages in which their body form changes radically, whereas human infants have approximately the same form that they will have as human adults. However, we humans do an incredible amount of developing before birth. Insects hatch from the egg at a relatively earlier stage of development, so many of the changes that take place are simply more visible to us.   The pictures below illustrate this; the human adult and his newborn son are much more similar in form than the immature monarch and it's adult mother.

Research on monarch development has been focused in two main areas:

• Physiological changes that occur during the stages from egg to adult, and
• Effects of environmental factors, such as temperature and daylength, on these processes.