Radio-tagged Monarch butterflies

Several of my family members and I have planted pollinator gardens in the hopes that we can provide fuel stations for all the migrating insects and birds. Since we are kinda scattered from hell to breakfast we ended up with small to large spaces available scattered across several states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It is great to see these migration paths tracked in this article.

That confirms that we are in good locations along normal flyways. My own property includes lots of antelope-horn milkweed and a couple other milkweeds. I found monarch caterpillars in my garden last week. With the recent rains breaking the summer drought I have so much in bloom again - asters, sunflowers, milkweed, numerous grasses, coreopsis, native onions, salvia, sage, dalea, etc. My place is humming with bees and wasps and the birds cast their tunes upon the winds.

For the first time since we moved here more than 25 years ago I had a meadowlark on my place and I was able to grab photos. It's a common bird where I grew up but though their range extends to this part of Texas, I had never seen one until late last week. Along with all the other birds passing through, that meadowlark was like encountering an old friend. I recognized the call and walked the place until I found the bird. As a kid I used to walk the pastures imitating the meadowlark calls, trying to sow confusion amongst their ranks, or maybe to let them know I might be one of the good guys. Who really knows?

I normally go outside every morning to identify birds using Merlin. For a couple weeks now, as I sit and listen to the world going by, monarchs and other butterflies have been migrating past. They are generally flying above treetop level hugging the treetops and terrain. As I drove north yesterday on a nice two hour trip there was a steady stream of butterflies. Most were traveling a few feet higher than an automobile as they crossed the road though some were skimming the ground and undoubtedly tempting fate. Makes me wonder how many have tags or stickers and of those, how many are scattered in pieces along the highway after dipping a bit too low to the ground.

Thanks for this article. I'm passing this around so that others can see where they are positioned on the flyway.

A lot comes up when you search for the BluMorpho tags. Some random links:

https://celltracktech.com/pages/blumorpho

https://monarchresearch.org/news-and-events/monarch-research...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/track-monarch-b...

https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/21/pacific-northwest-mon...

A little pdf guide: https://westernmonarchcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/M...

Looks like there is an app you can download too that can do stuff like scanning for tags nearby.

The site looks like it got hugged to death.

I’m on the monarch migration path and had wild milkweeds with monarch butterflies for a few years but the last 2-3 years oleander aphids exploded in population and I’ve seen a single caterpillar since.

Are there ways to mitigate that while not killing the monarchs or am I just shit out of luck?

What happens when a bird or predator eats the Monarch? Are these tags safe for animal consumption?

It’s amazing that they can cross Lake Michigan without stopping. It looks like 60-70 miles. What a cool project.

Wild stuff, thank you! I've got quite a few monarch fans to send this to now...

The ability of this tiny device to transmit Bluetooth in a 100 meter radius is wild!

Is there any chance that the plague of Flock sensors could be used to help track the radio tags?

The article made it seem that the tags way on the order of half a gram, but that would be about the butterfly's weight. Even at 60 mg it's a significant additional burden for the butterfly, I'd expect. Even if you only take the heaviest Monarch butterflies that weigh in about 600 mg, it is 10% of their body weight. Like an 6 kg backpack for a human weighing 60 kg.

Monarchs never really stop impressing. The journey they make cross-generational I think is just one of those marvels of nature that never fails to blow my mind.

Has anyone gone down to their nesting location in Mexico? It's on my bucket list but I hear that as their numbers dwindle, it's a harder thing to experience.

Very interesting!! HN never disappoints!

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