Picture: myriad orange triangles of life, 1000 elegant jewels, but these gems are not diamonds nor rubies. They're monarch butterflies who migrate from North America to Mexico. These remarkable insects are now threatened by a fatal parasite. One reason for infection may be that conservationists rear these butterflies and plant Milkweeds for them under more crowded conditions than exist in nature.
Ania Majewska is an ecologist and postdoctoral scholar at Emory University.
