How your smartphone could help unlock the mystery of the monarch butterfly's migration from Mexico
CBC
Adriana Avelina Ruíz Márquez uses fake eyelash glue to attach a tiny transmitter to the thorax, just behind the head, of the monarch butterfly.
The monarch, which weighs about half a gram, easily carries the 60-milligram device, which includes a solar panel the size of a grain of rice.
The butterfly flaps its wings and quickly gets airborne after Ruíz Márquez, a deputy director for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, releases it following the delicate operation, which also requires a toothpick and a Q-Tip.
Ruíz Márquez said she believes this new tracking device — used in Mexico for the first time to tag monarchs before they migrate back north to the U.S. and southern Canada — will help solve some mysteries about the insects, in part by using people's smartphones to track their movements.
"There is a lot of mystery to their route of migration, their activity when they arrive, when they leave," she said.
Around her, butterflies swirled, thick like mosquitos and blackflies during Canadian marshland dusks, in patches of sunlight pouring through the branches of the towering oyamel firs of the mountainous El Rosario butterfly sanctuary.
The vast majority of North America's monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains overwinter in El Rosario, which is located in the state of Michoacán about 180 kilometres west of Mexico City.
It's one of six sanctuaries that make up the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, which is spread across Michoacán and the State of Mexico and has a core protected area of about 135 square kilometres.
A total of 160 monarchs across the reserve, including 40 in El Rosario, have been tagged with the new transmitter by teams with the federal Commission for National Natural Protected Areas and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Mexico.
They will help provide the most detailed look to date at the first leg of the butterflies' migration north, said Eduardo Rendón Salinas, a biologist with WWF Mexico.
While the clouds of monarchs arrive around the beginning of November, they leave in dribs and drabs throughout March, he said.
"It is very important to do this new type of tagging in hibernation sites, to determine how they finish hibernating in Mexico," said Rendón Salinas.
He said they will now be able to track the movement of monarchs between colonies — which had been previously only theorized.
It takes three to four generations of monarchs to complete the journey north, which can span up to 5,000 kilometres.
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