How do monarch butterflies find their way

According to researcher Rachael Derbyshire, the team hit a few snags during the experimental process. She and some other volunteers initially set out with butterfly nets and managed to capture dozens of monarchs in August But when they were put in the flight simulator, the results were puzzling.

Her supervisor, Ryan Norris, headed out with another group of volunteers in mid- to late September and managed to catch 60 monarchs near a lake. Unlike the previous groups, those monarchs seemed to be actually headed somewhere, and they were the ones used in the final experiment. Derbyshire said keeping the monarchs healthy, including during the trip to Calgary, was time consuming because the butterflies seemed oblivious to the sponge soaked with sugar water that she put in their cage to feed them.

Derbyshire had to hand feed each of the 43 butterflies daily, carefully unraveling its tongue or proboscis with a pin and sticking it into the sponge. Science How monarch butterflies find their way to Mexico Canadian scientists think they have figured out how monarch butterflies navigate all the way from Canada to wintering sites in Mexico that they have never seen before.

Social Sharing. Experimental bumps According to researcher Rachael Derbyshire, the team hit a few snags during the experimental process. This journey, repeated instinctively by generations of monarchs, continues even as monarch numbers have plummeted due to loss of their sole larval food source — milkweed. But amid this sad news, a research team believes they have cracked the secret of the internal, genetically encoded compass that the monarchs use to determine the direction — southwest — they should fly each fall.

Each butterfly must also combine that information with the time of day to know where to go. Fortunately, like most animals including humans, monarchs possess an internal clock based on the rhythmic expression of key genes.

This clock maintains a daily pattern of physiology and behavior. In the monarch butterfly, the clock is centered in the antennae, and its information travels via neurons to the brain.

How do monarchs navigate to their destination, year after year? Not all monarchs are drawned to the South. Instinctively, they head southwest. Migratory monarchs rely on the sun to know the direction to follow.

However, since its position changes during the day, the simple observation of the sun is not enough. Imagine the zig-zag that a butterfly would do just by following the sun, every day, from east to west! To solve this problem, migratory monarchs rely on a biological clock, located in the antennas.

This clock tells them the time of day. With this information, the butterflies can adjust their position relative to the sun, in order to maintain the course towards the southwest: in the morning, they keep the sun to their left and in the afternoon, to their right. These two combined information — the position of the sun and the time of day — constitute the internal compass enabling the monarchs to navigate to Mexico.

Occasionally clouds hide the sun, depriving the monarchs of their visual cue. Fortunately, butterflies have more than one trick up their sleeve!