That’s according to a new research observation by Emily Geest, an entomologist at the Oklahoma City Zoo. Geest’s research isn’t normally so macabre — she mostly focuses on helping Oklahoma’s butterfly populations survive and thrive.
“They've undergone a lot more declines than we were anticipating them to undergo, and that's through habitat loss, habitat degradation,” Geest said. “Rampant pesticide use and climate change has impacted them all pretty negatively, just like the other groups of insects, including bees, dragonflies, ladybugs, anything.”
But a few years ago, someone dropped an interesting finding in Geest’s lap.
“When you study butterflies, people bring you butterflies more than you'd anticipate them doing,” Geest said. “And so they brought me this headless butterfly, and they were like, ‘Here you go. Here's a gift.’”
The butterfly could fly around, but it couldn’t eat without a proboscis or navigate without its antennae. Geest euthanized it, thinking it was an interesting one-off.
Five years later, someone brought her another one. And then the next year, another one. Geest realized she had a pattern on her hands.
“We should be at least documenting it to try to understand what's going on with this phenomenon,” Geest said. “It's weird and it's cool, and I hadn't read anything about it.”
She found other records of headless monarchs on social media but not a ton of academic writing. Online, people called it the Marie Antoinette phenomenon, after another monarch who lost her head.
A butterfly’s nervous system doesn’t all stem from one central brain like a human’s; instead, they have clusters of neurons scattered throughout their body.
“Their whole bodies and their whole body pattern is built off of repetition,” Geest said. “That's why they have so many legs, so many wings, multiple antennae. It's so that if they lose a piece, they can keep functioning.”
Some headless butterflies Geest found on social media had lost their heads in accidents, but at least one emerged from the chrysalis headless.
“It just gives us a little bit more insight into how insects are developing and what goes on in those like more mysterious pieces of their histories,” Geest said.
Geest’s work usually focuses more on conservation than answering questions about butterfly biology. She published her findings in American Entomologist but said she plans to leave the follow-up questions about headless monarchs to other researchers. But she hopes the Marie Antoinette phenomenon might inspire people to focus on butterflies.
“You can start planning out a garden if you don't have one,” Geest said. “You can be inspired by these headless monarchs to go out and plant your own garden and just start getting involved in monarch conservation.”
