Pat’s Wildways: Tagging Butterflies

It’s an issue that is in the back of my mind every week. I need a story! Every week for more than 20 years I have been writing my Wildways column, first in the Fernandina News Leader and for the past four or five years here in the online Fernandina Observer, a much better home for me. Every week, though! Some weeks, ideas rush at me; other weeks, not so much. This was one of those other weeks.

I went on a morning hike Friday with my friend Susan Gallion and she told me all about a Wild Amelia presentation on monarch butterflies she attended a few days earlier. I was so sorry I missed it, but hey, I had a lead. Maybe the butterfly scientist was still in town? So, I opened up my “coconut telegraph” on the island and contacted Wild Amelia-associated friends to track him down. And next thing I knew, the following morning at 6:30 a.m. I was having breakfast with Ray Moranz, monarch specialist extraordinaire.

Before we even started eating, we had already found shared friends and connections from our overlapping years at the University of Florida, where he was studying butterflies with world-renowned (now sadly departed) expert Dr. Lincoln Brower, and I was studying mammals. At the time, back in the 1980s, Dr. Brower and his students knew more about monarch butterflies, their physiology, their migrations, and their behavior than anyone else. And one thing Dr. Brower was sure of after all his research: Florida monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winters — it is just too cold here for them to survive.

Now, enter Ray Moranz, 40-some years later, who often travels from his home in Oklahoma to visit his sister here in Fernandina. And it didn’t take long for him to get curious about all the monarchs around in the winter and not much more time to convince his employer, the Xerces Society to fund further research into this matter. So now a few times a year, he puts tags on monarch butterflies here and elsewhere in north Florida and has linked up with other tagging efforts with Monarch Watch and other associates. Some tagged butterflies were later found in South Florida and Cuba. It’s looking like now, with winter temperatures more mild, monarch butterflies in north Florida are not migrating all the way to Mexico and some may even be overwintering right here. But the data is not in yet.

Of course I wanted to see the tagging operation myself, and it didn’t take much to convince Ray to capture and tag some more for me before setting off on his planned trip to Tallahassee later that day. So here it was, a fine Saturday morning that Ray and I hit the Egans Creek Greenway to catch butterflies. I followed him along the trail, carrying a long-handled professional butterfly net that I never used. Instead, I happily watched Ray dashing into the shrubs, wielding his net and snagging the four monarchs we found along the way. Two of these already had tags from his tagging efforts the day before, but two were new and are now part of the large monarch tagging database.

Along the way, Ray happily told curious passersby what we were doing and spread his conservation messages. He pointed out three native plants that are prime nectar sources for monarchs: Spanish needle, bur marigold, Elliott’s aster and saltbush. Some of these make good additions to backyard butterfly gardens, but beware, they grow quickly, reseed rapidly and can be invasive.

Once a monarch is caught, Ray carefully removes it from the net, holds it gently by the wings and slides it carefully into a wax paper packet until he finishes collecting. Then back at his mobile research station (his car), he collects data on each one: location found, time, weather, length of wings, fatness of abdomen, male or female, condition of wings, weight, etc.. Then he swipes its abdomen with a bit of sticky tape and puts the residue on his data sheet to examine later under a microscope to see if there are signs it has a protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE for short). Finally he places a lightweight numbered tag on its wings and sets it free to continue on in its travels. The hope is that other researchers and others with a keen eye will spot the tag, report it on the Monarch Watch app or website and more data will come.

I had a great time learning from Ray and even got to tag one butterfly myself. What a treat! To see more details about this process, look at the photos with this column. Amazing stuff!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com