Monarch butterflies attract human observers

Kalamazoo, MI
September 8, 2009
WMUK

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Ilse Gebhard checks a milkweed plant for monarch eggs

Male monarch (photo by Russ Schipper)

Monarch caterpillar (photo by Russ Schipper)

Monitors look for monarchs at Van Buren State Park

Millions of orange and black monarch butterflies are on the move across Michigan. They're heading to northern Mexico in their annual fall migration. But there's some concern that there are fewer butterflies around to make the trip this year. A group of volunteers in southwest Michigan is helping scientists keep an eye on the monarch population, as WMUK's Andy Robins reports.

Armed with binoculars and a spotting scope, a small group gathers on the beach at Van Buren State Park near South Haven. They hope to see the migration of monarch butterflies as they hug the Lake Michigan shoreline on their way south. But, despite encouraging signs, they've come in vain. Among the disappointed is Donna Keller of Kalamazoo. She had hoped to see hundreds of monarchs at a glance, a spectacle that does happen along the lakeshore from time to time.

Keller has much better luck in her role as a volunteer for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project based at the University of Minnesota. She's among several hundred people who monitor sites across the eastern half of the country that are likely to attract the butterflies. Each summer Keller, her daughter Ava, and son Wil come to the wildflower garden at Gilkey Elementary School in Plainwell to look for signs that monarchs are there too. The Kellers carefully examine the milkweed plants in the garden because that's the only place female monarchs lay their eggs. It's also the only place to find monarch caterpillars. This time the Kellers find about 70 eggs and several caterpillars. At the end of the summer they and other volunteers send their data to the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project's head office in Saint Paul.

Ilse Gebhard has a similar garden at her home northwest of Kalamazoo. Like the one in Plainwell, it's a monarch "way station" with several kinds of milkweed for larvae and wildflowers with nectar to feed adult butterflies. Gebhard has monitored her garden for the Monarch Project since the late 1990's. Monarch populations often fluctuate, but Gebhard says numbers this year have been especially low because of losses to predators, pesticides and motor vehicles. Gebhard says the unusually wet spring and very dry weather this summer didn't help either. The survival odds are so long that Gebhard and other volunteers often take monarch eggs and caterpillars home to raise in safety and then release the adult insects back into the wild.

Karen Oberhauser is the director of the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. She says if butterflies aren't doing very well that's a good sign that other parts of the environment are hurting too.

Unlike honey bees, monarchs and other kinds of butterflies aren't especially efficient pollinators. That makes them a lot less useful to farmers. But Oberhauser says measuring the worth of monarchs that way is a mistake because they're worth saving even without a direct impact on people.

Oberhauser says the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project is a good example of what she calls "citizen science". She says volunteers gather data that scientists need but can't collect on their own. And she says they have a good time doing it while raising public awareness of the need for conservation.

You can get more information about the program at the MLMP Web page or by calling Ilse Gebhard at (269) 375-7210.


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