A Monarch Drinking From a Teasel

This is a pretty good picture of a Monarch butterfly using its proboscis to drink nectar from deep in a Wild Teasel flower.

I was wondering if a long proboscis was necessary for a pollinator to use this flower, but my understanding is that bees, wasps, and flower flies are all common pollinators of these wildflowers. I guess this means that even though the flowers are long and narrow, you don't need to get to the bottom of them to get to pollen/nectar.

Teasels aren't native to North America, making it a little surprising that they're fairly popular with the pollinator community. Sometimes native pollinators simply don't know how to handle invasive plants.

As invasive plants go, teasels don't have an awful reputation. They obviously are successful enough to be taking resources that could be used by native plants, but they aren't ecologically useless. Besides being a useful food source for our pollinators, the seeds are eaten by small birds like finches and chickadees.

Teasels are in the honeysuckle family of plants, so most of their relatives are shrubs and vines.

July 28, 2021 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 148655956, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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