The Butterfly Effect: Study Sheds Light on Monarch Trek Natalie Stechyson - Postmedia News | |
go to original March 20, 2012 |
An impressive 10 per cent of the butterflies that reach Canada and the Northern United States make the entire trip directly from Mexico in a "single sweep" migration. (Mario Vazquez/Getty Images)
At the same time as unseasonably warm weather across much of the country has Canadians dreaming of summer, millions of monarch butterflies are beginning their upward migration from central Mexico.
And new research out of the University of Guelph in Ontario sheds light on how the orange and black beauties, which researchers consider a species of "special concern," manage to reach as far as southern Canada — a 3,000-kilometre journey.
The study notes that an impressive 10 per cent of the butterflies that reach Canada and the Northern U.S. make the entire trip directly from Mexico in a "single sweep" migration.
The study was led by University of Guelph researchers Ryan Norris and Nathan Miller, and by Leonard Wassenaar and Keith Hobson of Environment Canada in Saskatoon.
"This is an incredible journey from an animal this size, especially if you consider that these butterflies are little more than eight months old and have travelled thousands of kilometres over their lifetime," Miller said in a news release.
The other 90 per cent, the study said, are "first-generation" butterflies born en route in the Gulf Coast and Central regions of the United States, after their parents lay eggs on milkweed plants.
A new finding of the study was that most of the monarchs sampled had been born in central U.S. Previously, it had been thought the stopover took place in the southern states.
"Linking these periods of the breeding cycle provides us key information for conservation and identifies highly productive regions that fuel the migration further north," Norris said.
The new research suggests that the central U.S. is important for sustaining production in the northern breeding areas, the study said.
The monarch butterfly has been on Canada's "special concern" species list since 1997 because of Milkweek destruction.
The number of monarchs wintering in Mexico has dropped by nearly a third since 2011, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The new study was published this month in the journal PLoS One.
While it was previously known that nearly all of eastern North American population of monarch butterflies migrate southward to central Mexico, how exactly the butterflies relocated back to North America had been largely a mystery, according to the study.
Scientists still have more to learn about the monarch's migration in order to forecast how they could respond to environmental changes, Miller said.
Monarchs from 44 sites across Ontario and the Northern U.S. were sampled and analyzed for chemical markers and wing wear.
This season's monarchs started appearing in Texas last week, according to the website monarchwatch.org.
nstechyson@postmedia.com
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