A wildlife rehab center in Long Island gave a butterfly a second chance at life after surgically grafting a dead butterfly’s wing onto an injured one.
According to CBS New York, Dagmar Hoffdavis, a Deer Park resident, brought a wounded monarch to the Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown. The butterfly’s wing was shredded. There is no chance it was going to fly again.
Janine Bendicksen, Sweetbriar’s director of wildlife rehab, just so happened to be stocked with the two things you need to fix a butterfly wing: a pair of steady hands and access to butterfly corpses.
Bendicksen pulled off a butterfly wing transplant.
Wildlife Rehab Center Performs A Wing Transplant On A Butterfly
She searched her vivarium, found a conveniently dead monarch with intact wings, and got to work. No sedatives. No sutures. Just contact cement, some corn starch, a piece of wire, and enough precision to make a bomb tech sweat. Five minutes later, the butterfly had a fresh wing—and a new lease on life.
The whole process was captured on video and posted to social media, where it immediately went viral. Millions of views later, Bendicksen was fielding calls from wildlife rehabbers from Costa Rica, California, and Minnesota, all asking how she did that.
If you’re wondering that yourself, Bendicksen explained that she used a wire to hold the butterfly down delicately. She then used a combination of cornstarch and contact cement to bind the new butterfly wing to the damaged one.
The monarch was likely unharmed during the procedure, as monarch wings are nerve-free and bloodless. It’s a delicate procedure, but it’s not a painful one for the butterfly.
All of this would be the freakish backyard experiments of a childhood Dr. Frankenstein if it didn’t actually work, but luckily, it did. They released the butterfly into the air, hoping for the best, which is precisely what transpired. It flew off like it had never been injured in the first place.
Most Monarch butterflies don’t have a long life span. They usually only live for about 2 to 6 weeks, with only the migratory generation living anywhere between 6 to 9 months. This particular monarch was on a migratory path to Mexico, so it’s one of the lucky monarchs that gets to live just a bit longer than the rest.
And now that it has its wings surgically repaired, it’ll get a chance to live a full life.
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