Radio-tagged monarch MW001 arrives at the MBBR

Monarch Watch is participating in the Project Monarch Collaboration to deploy BlūMorpho radio tags on monarchs during the fall migration this year. The Project Monarch Collaboration was founded through a partnership between Cellular Tracking Technologies and the Cape May Point Arts and Science Center and involves lots of conservation organizations and scientists and an amazing group effort. BlūMorpho tags are extremely lightweight, solar-powered radio tracking tags that can be attached to the thorax of monarchs.

For our part of the project, we received 30 BlūMorpho tags. On September 26th and 27th, we attached each tag to a monarch butterfly and released them. The tagged monarchs can be tracked through the Project Monarch Science app, which you can download to follow along. The monarchs that we tagged are named MW001 through MW030, and you can search for them in the app by searching for “MW” to bring up all of our tagged monarchs.

Our monarchs were slow to move due to winds out of the South. They finally reached Oklahoma on October 7 and Texas on October 21. That is really slow movement! Our first BlūMorpho tagged monarchs reached Mexico on October 29. MW001 reached the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR) yesterday afternoon! MW001 is a male that weighed 0.6 grams when we first caught him in Lawrence, Kansas on September 25, and he had a wing length of 53mm. Several of the other ones that we tagged are close to the MBBR, including two more males and two females.