For the first time ever, biologists at the University of Guelph has mapped the migration pattern all over the continent over the whole breeding season. Tyler Flockhart, a student in the Department of Integrative Biology, said in an interview with the Lab Canada, the information they have collected can help preserve an increasingly threatened creature by loss of food sources and habitat.
Scientists haven’t grasped the complete knowledge yet of the connection of adult butterflies to their places of birth during a complex annual migration across the entire Eastern North America and including up to five generations of the beautiful insects.
Before, the scientists only had a rough estimate of those annual colonization patterns, said Prof. Ryan Norris to the Lab Canada.
He added that in able to envisage the effects on the insects of milkweed plant loss, habitat destruction and other factors and understand why the population of monarch are diminishing, following the migration patterns is very important.
Chemical markers in butterfly wings are used by researchers to go with the waves of insect generations with their places of birth. Milkweed is the only food of monarch larvae. Since the plant’s chemical signature is different from one place to another, by analysis of the chemical components in its wings, scientists can determine a butterfly’s birthplace.
In summer 2011, Flockhart netted more than 800 monarchs for analysis by following their northward migration. He said, “As far as I know, it’s the broadest sample of monarch butterflies through an entire breeding season across North America.”
Professor Norris also added that monarch survival is affected by the loss of milkweed plants and planting genetically modified soy and corn in the Midwest.
Protecting the environment for their procreation in different places is another vital thing to be able to generate the next batch of the monarch.
This research, led by Flockhart together with Prof Ryan Norris and their co-authors based in Australia, Colorado and Saskatchewan, will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
