Sweetbriar Nature Center – via Storyful
With a pioneering procedure, a nature center in New York made sure that a broken wing wasn’t the end of one monarch butterfly’s journey.
Famous for migrating from Mexico up to Canada, a Deer Park resident found one of these orange beauties stranded with the upper section of its right forewing broken.
Janine Bendicksen is the director of wildlife rehabilitation at the Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown, NY, and she had to think fast when a woman brought in the injured monarch.
There were many monarchs inside Bendicksen’s vivarium, and wondered if maybe she could find a dead one and transplant its wing onto the injured one. Sure enough, a late resident was available as a donor.
“It was so intricate, because this butterfly could fall apart if I pressed too hard,” Bendicksen told CBS News. “We used contact cement, we had corn starch, a little piece of wire that we could hold the butterfly down with.”
The one easy part was that butterfly’s have no nerve endings in their upper wings. There are no blood vessels either.
The procedure was recorded on the center’s social media page, and it produced a viral response with over a million views—all to see this little insect receive the most delicate of helping hands.
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To Bendicksen’s mind, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to transplant a butterfly wing onto another butterfly, and true to that assessment, her phone began to receive calls from entomologists from all over the West Coast.
“I’m getting calls from Minnesota, Costa Rica, California,” she said. “This butterfly would have died if we didn’t try. We need hope in this world today.”
WATCH the video below…
An injured monarch butterfly was able to continue its migration after undergoing a wing transplant at a nature preserve in New York.
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