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On warm fall days in North Carolina we often notice the big orange and black butterflies--monarchs--flying resolutely southward. These beautiful animals are in the midst of an epic journey, all the way to the mountains of Mexico. Nowhere else in the world do butterflies--or any insects--undertake such ambitious migrations.
Although monarch butterflies are among the most conspicuous of all insects, we actually know very little about their migrations. Scientists assume that at least some of North Carolina's monarchs fly southward to the Gulf coast, then westward around the Gulf to Mexico. But so far, no monarch from the Carolinas has been definitely identified at the Mexican wintering sites. Many monarchs from the southeastern states probably fly into Florida, where monarchs are active all winter. As far as is known, these Florida monarchs do not return northward, but their children do.
To learn more about monarch populations and migrations, Monarch Watch enlists the help of volunteers, especially school classes. Founded in 1991 and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Monarch Watch has become a national effort. It is based at the University of Kansas and directed by Kansas entomologist Orley R. "Chip" Taylor, Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota and Brad Williamson, a teacher at Olathe East High School, Kansas. There are regional Monarch Watch coordinators throughout the country, including Mike Dunn at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.
Monarch Watch volunteers capture and tag monarchs, and they keep an eye out for monarchs that have been tagged by others. Surprisingly young students can do this: thousands of tags were used by third and fourth grade classes, for example. Tagging is easy, it does not harm the butterflies in any way, and it is an outstanding project for integrating science with math, geography, and other subject areas.
During 1996-97, an astounding 49,600 butterflies were tagged, the majority of them by school classes. Only 117 of these tagged butterflies were recovered later, but even this small number of recoveries provided valuable information on the movement of the butterflies. Two monarchs tagged in the upper Midwest were recovered in the southeast, proving that monarch migrations can go seriously awry sometimes.
There is much more to Monarch Watch than tagging butterflies, however. The project includes a complete K-8 curriculum. Monarchs can be raised and studied right in the classroom, with the adult butterflies released in the wild: an exciting project for youngsters. Monarch Watch provides extensive information on butterfly life history, food plants, butterfly gardening, and other aspects of the monarch's world. Monarch Watch also has an outstanding Internet site where students and teachers can follow the progress of the research project and learn about butterfly biology.
One probable reason there are so few recoveries is that there are not enough schools participating in the southern states, where the recoveries would probably be made. Here's a great project in which North Carolina schools can contribute to real scientific research while addressing the inquiry goals and science process skills of our Standard Course of Study.
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Posted October 1, 1997. Features remain online as long as they remain current; they may be updated if new information becomes available.
Copyright © 1997, Center for Mathematics and Science Education. Teachers have permission to duplicate this page for use in teaching their own classes. All other rights reserved. You are welcome to link to this page, but do not copy its contents.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/cmse/webideas/monarch.html
Center for Mathematics and Science Education
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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