This photo shows the simplest case of caterpillar death. They look like a railroad car that has fallen off the track. They just flop over. I have seen black ones and failed chrysalises.
I searched the internet and found this useful site. There are a lot of different dangers that confront monarch raisers. One way to get an initial grip on remedial steps to take is to see what suggestions appear under each ailment. There are two to keep in mind: air circulation and... I forgot the other one. Oh, I guess it was cleanliness. Actually they both go together.
The linked site mentioned the source of milkweed plants. I recently bought 4 more from a trusted nursery. I need to check with them to see if they used pesticides in their plant production process.
In my case I am concerned about chemicals in the plastic boxes I just bought. Perhaps they need to be aired out well before use. I borrowed an old trick from my aerospace days: I outgassed them.
Early in the space program in the early 1960's, one of the astronauts reported some gunk on his window. It turns out that if parts have some volatile compounds on them when launched into space, the high vacuum of space causes the gasses from these compounds to come out or outgas. Then they can deposit themselves on nearby surfaces like windows and camera lenses. In the building I worked in at Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama, they had a house-sized vacuum chamber. Any incoming parts for spacecraft built there at Marshall were first put into this chamber under a hard vacuum for several hours in expectation of ridding the parts of volatile compounds.
In the case of my plastic shoe boxes, I put them in the oven at 160 degrees F for a couple hours.
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