Desirée Narango’s White River Junction lab is filled with mesh butterfly cages, where monarch butterflies are perpetually emerging. A dozen or so bright green chrysalises hang from a sandwich board, each bundle the size of a thumbnail and bedazzled with a tiny strip of gold.
In one, you could see the curled shape of a butterfly, its dark spotted wings just visible through the goo. Narango carefully moved this one to its own cage.
“We want to make sure that they’re in the absolute perfect condition for migration,” Narango said. “All of the monarchs we have here, we’ve raised either from eggs or caterpillars, with as much milkweed as possible, as they want to eat, so they can be as big as they can.”
Narango leads a team of scientists at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies who are tagging these delicate insects with ultralight transmitter backpacks powered by tiny solar panels.
The backpacks use Bluetooth to transmit data about the butterfly’s location to cellphones, providing scientists with an unprecedented view into the mysterious lives of these migrating insects.
The hope is to find out exactly where Vermont’s eastern monarchs are going as they migrate south for the winter, and to better protect them, as the insects face mounting threats from climate change, habitat loss and pesticide use.
David La Puma, who helped develop the technology, said most transmitters biologists use to track migrating wildlife rely on lightweight batteries, which are too heavy for butterflies and other insects to carry.
“[These trackers have] opened the door for this whole suite of too-small-to-tag species, which includes small songbirds, even hummingbirds,” said La Puma, who works with the international research collaborative Project Monarch that is compiling the data.
The first trackers were deployed on butterflies last fall, and already, they are upending years of established thinking. For example, not all eastern monarchs migrate to Mexico; the new backpacks have confirmed that some winter in Florida and parts of the Caribbean.
Researchers have also been surprised to find that monarchs spend a lot of time in urban environments and old industrial sites along their migration paths — two places that haven’t previously been the focus of conservation work.
“It’s honestly shocking because we’re in real time watching these individuals go through these hazardous landscapes, and all us scientists are texting each other like, ‘Oh my gosh! Ann is in New York City!’” Narango said. (Ann is one of the names — along with Scott, Gordon, Pam and Brad — given to the butterflies by the researchers.) “It really sort of blows your mind how much these individuals need to go through to make it all the way to Mexico.”
Narango says people who want to follow along with this intrigue can download the Project Monarch app to see where Vermont monarchs are traveling in real time.
Back in the lab in the Upper Valley, Narango expertly pulled a butterfly from a cage, holding it delicately by the abdomen, with its wings pinned.
Then, Narango slid the butterfly’s abdomen into a groove on a styrofoam board. She carefully and gently restrained its wings and abdomen and pulled out the tiny backpack, which weighs less than one-tenth of the insect’s bodyweight.
“Whenever there’s sunlight hitting that solar panel,” she said. “This unit is going to start putting out a radio signal, a very high-pitched radio signal that only special receivers and bluetooth devices can hear.”
From there, she glued the transmitter to the butterfly’s abdomen using nontoxic, active eyelash glue, and let it dry for 15 minutes.
After making sure the monarch could fly, Narango released it to make its way to wherever it was headed.
Vermont is one of about 20 places in North America where scientists are tagging monarchs with these backpacks for Project Monarch.
It’ll take three to five years for scientists to have conclusive data about where Vermont’s monarchs are traveling, but researchers like Narango hope this project will let them track these tiny creatures for years to come.■
