Litchfield students help track butterfly migration

LITCHFIELD - Students here are spending a lot of time hunting this fall. But they’re not interested in birds; what they’re hunting for are Monarch Butterflies.

High school science teacher, Dudley Friskopp and his life science and biology students, along with the elementary students, are participating in Monarch Watch. Monarch Watch is a Monarch Butterfly tagging project, sponsored by the Entomology Department of the University of Kansas at Lawrence.

The goal of the project is to catch Monarch Butterflies, tag them, and hope they are seen later, said Friskopp.

“(We are) trying to figure out the migration pattern of

Monarchs,” he said.

Friskopp added that this project is especially suited to his 7th grade life science class.

The students are learning how to conduct their own research, and the Monarch tagging project directly involves them with a research project that works on a bigger scale, Friskopp said.

The students grab the butterflies whenever they can and have found that landing nets, otherwise used for fishing, work well to nab the insects, Friskopp said.

The best time to find Monarchs is when they are roosting. The butterflies seem to hang out in big bunches, and Friskopp said that 1,000 or more can be found just hanging out together in an area for a couple of days. “Groups assemble and migrate like birds do,” he said. The students in Litchfield haven’t stumbled onto any big groups yet, but have tagged about three dozen Monarchs so far.

The fifth and sixth grade classes are also helping with the tagging project. Marlene Rasmussen’s class was supplied with 12 butterflies by their classroom aid JoEllen Russel.

She brought the Monarchs from the Joe Charron farm where they were seen congregating by the hundreds a few weeks ago.

The students took the butterflies to the high school science room where they helped with the tagging.

The students begin the project by recording data. The date, time of day, temperature, wind direction, wind speed and sex of the insect is noted. This data will later be sent to the University of Kansas.

The students then affix a tag to the butterfly. A small amount of special glue is spread on the under side of the lower wing, and the tag is gently pressed into place using a pencil eraser. The tag is visible when the butterfly is resting in the wings up position.

The color coded and numbered tags include the address of the University of Kansas on them. The color of the tag indentifies the location in which the butterfly was caught. The number on the tag corresponds to the data collected about the butterfly.

When the Monarch is found again, the information on the tag is sent to the University, the data is recovered, and migration patterns are recorded.