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Contents:

1) Welcome!

2) Conservation Perspectives

3) Status of the Population

4) Natural and Unnatural Emergence Times

5) Please Return Your Data Sheets

6) Tachinid Update

7) Monarchs Tagged in 2001 and Found in 2003?!

8) An Invitation: Video Conference with Monarch Watch

9) How to Unsubscribe from this Update

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1) Welcome to Monarch Watch's Update List!

You are receiving this email because you have provided Monarch Watch with your email address at some point and expressed interest in receiving updates from us. If you do not wish to receive these periodic (probably monthly) email updates or feel that you were subscribed in error, please see the unsubscribe information at the end of this message.

Have you somehow missed (or misplaced ;-) an update? Now you can find all of the updates archived online at

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If you know someone that you think might be interested in receiving these email updates from Monarch Watch with monarch news, special announcements, tips on raising monarchs in your classroom, monarch tagging information and a whole lot more, please send them on over to

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to join our new Monarch-Watch-Update email list - it's easy!

Monarch Watch (http://www.MonarchWatch.org) is a not-for-profit educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas. We run a Monarch tagging program and offer Monarch Rearing Kits, Monarch Tagging Kits, and other educational/promotional materials that allow you to actively experience the monarch life cycle and its spectacular fall migration.If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us anytime!

Your friends at Monarch Watch
http://www.MonarchWatch.org
monarch@ku.edu

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2) Conservation Perspectives - by Jordi Honey-Rosés

The Monarchs’ Arrival at the Overwintering Sites in Mexico
Update November 16th, 2003

Monarch butterflies have begun to fill the skies of central Mexico thereby inaugurating the 2003-04 Monarch overwintering season. Their late arrival this year has made Monarch watchers especially anxious to spot the continental travelers conclude the last leg of their fall migration. Conventional wisdom on the internet and in Mexico agrees that the rainy and stormy weather conditions in the months of September and October throughout Mexico probably delayed slightly the Monarchs arrival this year.

At the end of October no word of any significant Monarch sightings had yet been brought to my attention. Community leaders that benefit from tourism are usually the first to spread the news of the Monarch’s arrival in the last week of October. However the first report of major Monarch clusters came well into the first week of November. My own first sighting of a lone Monarch came on October 30th in Zitácuaro, Michoacán. It was also the first Monarch sighting of the season for my two World Wildlife Fund (WWF) colleagues both of whom reside in Zitácuaro.

On November 14th a leading community member from the Ejido Cerro Prieto claimed that three colonies had formed in the Sierra Chincua. Local reports are usually valuable and helpful for researchers and conservationists working in the area. At the same time one needs to be cautious since local claims can be biased, or at least slightly tainted by the promotional necessity of their tourism businesses. It is also common for locals to provide the answers that they believe the eager Monarch researcher would like to hear.

After having received permission from both the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR) and the Ejido Cerro Prieto we ventured up to the Sierra Chincua on the morning November 15th to find the reported Monarch colonies. Joining me was Pablo Ángeles, a Forester working for WWF and David Lagacé, a research collaborator with the MBBR.

We departed by foot from the Llano de las Papas Biological Station at 10:35 am. Instead of taking the main road directly to the Llano Villalobos where the Cerro Prieto tourist entrance is located we instead hiked first to the Llano el Establo. We then crossed over to the Eastern edge of the Llano de Villalobos and encountered our first sighting of a few hundred Monarchs flying high overhead at 10:58 am. Interestingly, no Monarchs were seen in the Llano del Establo located just a few meters to the East or in the Federal Property Zone where we continued our search for the Monarch colony.

Using the various local reports to guide us, we finally found a Monarch butterfly colony at 364029 East and 2175693 North UTM (Nad 27) at 1 in the afternoon. The colony was found in an oyamel forest at the approximate altitude of 3,350 meters. Large boulders divided the colony into two sections. Roosting Monarchs occupied 56 trees in the upper section above the boulders and 28 trees in the lower section totaling to 84 trees in all. The irregular polygon of the colony was geopositioned with a GPS unit and later we calculated the area in Arc View giving us an estimate of 1.2 hectares.

We then ventured to the Llano del Toro and the Zapatero canyon where Monarchs are found nearly every year. Visitors to the Chincua colony will surely recall the wide trail heading down the Zapatero canyon from the circular esplanade known as the Llano del Toro. The Monarch butterflies were caught in this canyon during the cold winter storm of January 12th and 13th 2002 that left millions of Monarchs frozen.

Contrary to a local report, we found no clustering Monarchs near the Llano del Toro or further down into Zapatero canyon. A few Monarchs were seen flying high and up the canyon probably back to the colony we had just visited. We would expect the Monarchs to move down into the Llano del Toro and Zapatero canyon later in the season, probably in late December or early January. No other colony was found on this trip, although it is quite possible that other colonies could be found in areas we did not explore.

This week of November 17th the MBBR will formally begin to monitor all the colonies with the help of local ejidatarios. The colonies will be open to the public in the last week of November.

Using the various local reports to guide us, we finally found a Monarch butterfly colony at 364029 East and 2175693 North UTM* (Nad 27)** at 1 in the afternoon. The colony was found in an oyamel forest at the approximate altitude of 3,350 meters. Large boulders divided the colony into two sections. Roosting Monarchs occupied 56 trees in the upper section above the boulders and 28 trees in the lower section totaling to 84 trees in all. The irregular polygon of the colony was geopositioned with a GPS unit and later we calculated the area in Arc View giving us an estimate of 1.2 hectares.

We then ventured to the Llano del Toro and the Zapatero canyon where Monarchs are found nearly every year. Visitors to the Chincua colony will surely recall the wide trail heading down the Zapatero canyon from the circular esplanade known as the Llano del Toro. The Monarch butterflies were caught in this canyon during the cold winter storm of January 12th and 13th 2002 that left millions of Monarchs frozen.

Contrary to a local report, we found no clustering Monarchs near the Llano del Toro or further down into Zapatero canyon. A few Monarchs were seen flying high and up the canyon probably back to the colony we had just visited. We would expect the Monarchs to move down into the Llano del Toro and Zapatero canyon later in the season, probably in late December or early January. No other colony was found on this trip, although it is quite possible that other colonies could be found in areas we did not explore.

This week of November 17th the MBBR will formally begin to monitor all the colonies with the help of local ejidatarios. The colonies will be open to the public in the last week of November.
* UTM is an abbreviation for Universal Transverse Mercator, which is a metric system grid of the world and most commonly used in GIS systems such as Arc View. It is convenient because the coordinates are in meters and each meter is consistently the same everywhere around the world, whereas the degrees, minutes, seconds system is distorted since one degree on the equator is not the same as one degree at latitudes north or south of the equator.
** Nad 27 is the North American Datum created in 1927, which is specific map of the world with a particular origin and has slight variations from other commonly used Datums like WGS 84. It is important to clarify which Datum is used since points can later be up to 200 meters off.

Conservation Perspectives
Conservation Perspectives will provide regular and accurate updates on the local conservation issues at the Mexican overwintering sites of the Monarch Butterfly. This space will be a forum for discussion and sharing. The updates will serve as conduit for ideas and stories that are rarely heard from Mexican side of the border, especially those successes by local Mexican inhabitants to protect the forest of the Monarch Butterfly.

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3) Status of the Population - by Chip Taylor

All that I can add to the above is that there are also reports of monarchs arriving at El Rosario, which is usually the largest of the overwintering colonies. It is too early to assess the total size of the overwintering population. At this writing (16 Nov), there are still large numbers of monarchs in Neuvo Leon in northern Mexico and monarchs should continue to arrive at the overwintering colonies through the first week of December. Preliminary estimates of the size of the population should be available in the next 4-6 weeks. Based on the reports from taggers, it seems likely that the population this winter will be greater than the 8 hectares measured for all colonies last winter.

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4) Natural and Unnatural Emergence Times - by Chip Taylor

Monarchs generally emerge from their pupae in the morning. In fact, you can plan on a morning emergence for teaching and demonstrations. If you need to have monarchs emerge "on command" for afternoon events, or photography, it is a simple matter to delay emergence so that the monarchs emerge from the pupae when you want them to. If you have a number of pupae and you want them to emerge within a particular hour, you can achieve this by learning how recognize the color, pattern, and appearance of pupae just prior to emergence. Once you are confident that you can identify pupae that are within an hour or two of emergence all you have to do is place these pupae in the refrigerator in a container that will chill rapidly. If you want to have precise control of emergence, you wake up at 5 AM and check the pupae, refrigerating any that look like they might emerge by 7 AM. Continue to check the pupae each hour, refrigerating pre-emergent pupae as needed. You can accumulate such pupae over a day or several days; however, you should be sure that the container has a source of moisture (such as a wet paper towel) if you refrigerate them for an extended time. When you are ready, the pupae can be removed from the refrigerator and placed on a rough surface, such as an old towel, that will allow the monarchs to crawl up a vertical surface so they can expand their wings. If you have done a good job of selecting the pupae, emergence should take place over the next two hours and can happen as early as 20 minutes after you have removed them from the refrigerator. Just prior to emergence, the cuticle of the pupa begins to separate from that of the developing adult and this can give a gray cast to the appearance of the pupa. If the goal is to photograph a "natural" emergence, the larvae can be induced to pupate on sticks, etc., or they can be tied or glued to sticks before placing them in the refrigerator. Pupae are very delicate just prior to emergence so it is not advisable to handle them at this time. We’ve used these tricks for video productions, photo sessions and public education. You could adopt these methods for similar purposes and others. This approach works because the refrigeration stops development. You are placing the monarchs in an environment in which the temperature is below "developmental zero". For a discussion of developmental zero, see the May 2002 Email Update.

Two of the biological questions about emergence times are: why does it occur predominantly in the morning and what sets, or determines, the time of emergence? Why monarchs, and nearly all butterflies for that matter, tend to emerge in the morning, is not clear to me. Monarchs take 5-15 minutes to expand their wings and typically require an hour before they are able to fly even a short distance. Flight and feeding are minimal during the first day if the temperatures are moderate. The butterflies are mostly quiescent, their cuticle is still soft and not all their sensory/motor systems may be fully operational. Why do they expose themselves by emerging in the morning when an alternative would seem to be to emerge late in the day when it is still warm? Such a pattern would allow them to "mature" during the night with minimal exposure to predators. The answer may be that maturation is faster during the day due to higher daytime temperatures and exposure to the sun that tends to elevate body temperatures through absorption of radiant energy. Whatever the reason, there still has to be an environmental cue or signal that "sets’ the time of emergence, a kind of a clock by which development is somehow controlled or regulated so that emergence occurs at the time of day shaped by selection. In the absence of external cues, and an internal rate regulating process, monarchs would emerge at all times of day and night as dictated by the number of degree days (see May 2002 Email Update) experienced by the developing pupa. If you work with hundreds of pupae of monarchs or other Lepidoptera, you will notice that a number of the pupae appear "ready" to emerge up to 12 hours before they are scheduled to emerge on the next day. Rather than emerging, these pupae seem to slow down and "wait" for the next normal emergence period. Something is at work here and this something appears to be the circadian clock, or 24 hour rhythm, that is set by sunrise and sunset. Through mechanisms that are under intense study, organisms acquire daily information on sunrise and sunset - the period gene (the gene regulating our daily rhythms) responds to these changes. By tracking and responding to the daily changes through the activity of genes, organisms have a built in clock that allows them to initiate behaviors at specific times of day. Thus, monarchs emerge, and, later when mated, lay eggs in the morning and mate in the afternoon. Some organisms can be trained to respond at specific times of day. If honeybees are trained to come to a feeder at a specific time, say, 1:15PM, over a period of several days they will begin to arrive at the feeder in good numbers shortly before 1:15 in anticipation that you will fill the feeder at that time.

The fact that organisms have biological clocks is easily demonstrated with simple clock shifting experiments. In these cases, the organisms are placed in environments with shifted light cycles. The simulated sunrise or sunset is either advanced or delayed and tests are conducted to determine if the behavior in question shifts in the predicted manner. Thus, if we were to shift the light cycle 6 hours earlier for a group of monarch pupae that all formed on the same day, at the time of emergence, we would expect them to emerge an average of 6 hours earlier than the control (non-shifted) group. What would happen if the pupae were placed in complete darkness, that is, with no light signal to indicate the start or end of a day? Under these conditions, we might expect them to emerge when development was completed and this could be at any time of the day. In fact, this is exactly what happens. In a recent study (Froy, et. al 2003) monarch pupae placed in complete darkness emerged at all times of the day. Further, because these butterflies were not synchronized to a daily on-off light signal, they were not able to use the sun as a reference to determine their direction of flight.

If you are experimentally inclined, you can see that emergence experiments offer many possibilities for classroom experiments.

Froy O, Gotter AL, Casselman AL, Reppert SM (2003) Illuminating the circadian clock in monarch butterfly migration. Science 300:1303-1305

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5) Please Return Your Datasheets

Each year we spend quite a bit of time and money trying to track down missing data sheets and even after multiple requests by phone, fax, email, or regular mail some data sheets are never returned. These recovered tags then are essentially meaningless and the resources spent on tagging the monarchs, recovering the tags, and processing the data are wasted :-( Given our already limited resources, these "lost" data sheets are a big deal - those 150 records from 2002 alone will translate into over $1,500.00 in expenses that could have been better spent elsewhere.

So please, PLEASE return your data sheets and any unused tags once the migration has left your area or you have finished tagging for the season (Be sure to make a copy first, as things have been known to disappear in the mail occasionally). It's never too late to return your sheets -- even if you find them months later, make a copy and send them in! Thanks!

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6) Tachinid Update - by Chip Taylor

In the table below I have added the records for the rate of parasitism by tachinid flies for October. The rate of parasitism declined from the seasonal high of 67% in September to 4.3% in October. Thus, it appears that the last monarch larvae of the year are less likely to be parasitized. However, at this latitude October monarch larvae often experience cold weather that delays their maturation until frosts kill them. This year was quite exceptional and we still had monarch larvae in our milkweed garden as late as the 6th of November.

Rate of parasitism of 3-5th instar larvae collected in the wild summer 2003

Date / Parasitized / Normal / Deformed / Dead, other causes* / Proportion Parasitized**

June / 3 / 10 / 1 / 7 / .214

July / 3 / 14 / 0 / 1 / .176

Aug / 21 / 25 / 0 / 2 / .456

Sept / 60 / 29 / 0 / 0 / .674

Oct / 1 / 18 / 2 / 0 / .043

Total / 88 / 96 / 3 / 10 / .471

* Disease or pesticide – symptoms of non-inclusion virus, pesticide poisoning and unknown.

** Proportion of all J (pre-pupation) or pupal stage immatures from which tachinid larvae emerged.

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7) Monarchs Tagged in 2001 and Found in 2003?! - by Sarah Schmidt

"How can it be that a butterfly I tagged in 2001 was found in 2003?" is getting to be a very common question we are receiving. This is not a typo; those dates are correct and these reports are not at all unusual. As a matter of fact, four tags used in 1997 were recovered in 2003. Recovery in this case refers to the date we recovered the tag and not when the tagged butterfly was found. The reason for the delay in the recovery date has to do with how tags are obtained in Mexico. Monarch Watch goes once a year to collect the tags and we're only in the sanctuary area for about a week. News of our presence spreads by word of mouth and people look for us with the tags that they have collected. There are also a few other monarch scientists who collect tags on our behalf when they visit the sanctuaries. However, we aren't able to recover all of the tags that have been found each year. This is simply because we don't connect with all the people who have tags during these short trips. However, the tag collectors hang onto the tags from year to year in the hope that they will be able to sell the tags to us, or those acting in our behalf, at some time in the future. We also have limited funds, so we aren't always able to buy back all of the tags that have been found and they must wait another year. The people collecting the tags do not keep track of the dates they are found, so we list the recovery date as the date Monarch Watch receives the tag. The 2001 tags are also a bit of a special case. Millions of monarchs were killed by the storm in January 2002, which left piles of dead monarchs up to 2 feet deep in the sanctuaries. As a result, some tags were found long after the butterfly was killed and long after Monarch Watch visited the sanctuaries (the Mexico trip occurred the week before the storm that year).

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8) An Invitation: Video Conference with Monarch Watch - by Chip Taylor

Last month we asked if any of you use Mac OS X and have the capability of using iChatAV, Apple Computer's personal video conferencing software for OS X. Please see the October 24, 2003 update for further details. Our intention is to use this system to video conference with classrooms and to develop a list of teachers who would be interested in communicating school to school with this technology.

We held our first video conference with a class on November 12th. We connected with Karen Vitek and her students at Nassau Spackenkill School in Poughkeepsie, New York (over 1100 miles from KU, by the way ;-). The students asked questions and I in turn asked questions of them. Our session lasted about 35 minutes - this may have been a bit long for a group of 9 year olds. Overall it was a good experience. We learned a great deal about the promise and limitations of this technology. The most limiting factor was the webcam. The iSight camera we are currently using with iChat is designed for one to one communication and it's excellent for this purpose; however, it is difficult to communicate with a large number of students and use the camera for show and tell lessons. In the future, we will connect a firewire-capable camcorder to our Mac for these sessions. A camcorder will allow us to move the camera and focus on a range of objects we like to use for demonstrations. Another feature that's helpful, particularly on the classroom end of the communication, is an LCD projector. The projected image allows a large number of participants to see the interaction between Monarch Watch and the students. Unlike standard video conferencing, which is often technically challenging and complicated, iChatAV was very easy to implement.

If you are a teacher and would like to participate in an iChat video conference with your students, please contact us at monarch@ku.edu to discuss this further.

We videotaped our first "official" iChat have posted stills and video from the session online at

http://www.MonarchWatch.org/update/ichat.html

For more information on iChatAV visit http://www.apple.com/ichat/

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Thanks!

Monarch Watch
http://www.MonarchWatch.org
monarch@ku.edu