A butterfly with a broken wing means almost certain death. But Janine Bendicksen, of Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown, was determined to see one monarch butterfly survive.<\/p>\n
Bendicksen said she\u2019s always wanted to try a transplant on a butterfly, and after 25 years at the nature center, she got the chance. <\/p>\n
A monarch butterfly with a wing that was bent and eventually fell off wound up at the center – and Bendicksen took it home and performed a wing transplant. <\/p>\n
She used a wing found in the enclosure at Sweetbriar\u2019s butterfly vivarium, as well as contact cement, a small toothpick and corn starch. <\/p>\n
She says she had to get creative prior to the procedure. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first tried to do it, the butterfly was way too active, and I said I can\u2019t, like, anesthetize this thing and then I realized if I put him in the refrigerator he would slow down, so that is exactly what I did,” she said. <\/p>\n
Bendicksen was able to successfully give the butterfly a new wing – it took around five minutes – and later released it. <\/p>\n
Monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico and it should be well on his way.<\/p>\n
Bendicksen posted a video of the procedure to social media and it has received millions of views.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A butterfly with a broken wing means almost certain death. But Janine Bendicksen, of Sweetbriar Nature Center in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-211425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}