Monarch Tagging Project
Written by Wesley Hutchins.
My name is Wesley Hutchins, and I have been a member of the Maine Entomological Society for about five years. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life, and I am a sophomore student at the University of Maine. My major is wildlife ecology, and I have been in love with all forms of wildlife my entire life. It would be nice if I could find a career in something entomology-related later in life; perhaps in the forestry industry. My scholarship from UMaine comes with $500 a year to be spent on research, so I looked around for a project involving wildlife, and found the New England Monarch Migration project! I have been raising monarchs ever since I was a kid, so I jumped at the opportunity to be involved with this project.
The New England Monarch Migration project is going well so far! As an undergraduate student at the University of Maine, I've been working with Dr. Amber Roth to complete some research on local monarchs. We hope to answer the following question about monarch migration as they fly south later this year:
How long do monarchs stay in the area where they lived as caterpillars?
To answer this question, we are going to affix nanotags from Lotek to monarch adults so that we can track their movements. This project is taking place at the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden, and this is where all of our monarchs so far have been collected.
The nanotags are very small!
The first step was to find monarchs to use for this project. We decided that catching adults would be too tricky, so I’ve been collecting as many caterpillars as I can from the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden. I’ve visited the center once a week for the past 4 weeks, and as of the writing of this post, I have twelve individual monarchs: four are caterpillars and 8 are chrysalises. I’ve been feeding them milkweed collected from the road that I live on.
While the caterpillars and chrysalises are developing, there has been a lot of work for me to do regarding the technology that will be used in this project. I have five nanotags that will be attached to 5 of the heaviest monarch adults, and these tags must be registered and activated before being used. They must be registered with the company that made them, the Motus Wildlife Tracking System. Once this is completed, anyone can go onto the Motus website and see the data from the New England Monarch Migration project. Each of the nanotags has a unique “ping” that is picked up by a large antenna at the Fields Pond Audubon Center, and I had to upload to Motus a recording of each tag’s ping before they can be used in the field. That way, the antenna knows what to “listen” for, and the data appears on the Motus website.
As of the writing of this post, all of the nanotags have been activated, recorded, and then deactivated. These recordings have been approved by Motus. My oldest chrysalis is expected to emerge sometime this weekend or early next week, so all that is left to do is wait for a butterfly to emerge and then tag it!
This post was written by Wesley Hutchins and is the first in his installment of updates about his Monarch Tagging Project, which is partially supported by a scholarship by the Maine Entomological Society.
