The butterfly checked in from Texas on Monday. Then, on Tuesday, from Mexico. Researchers at Virginia Tech answered on the first ring, because that is what the new equipment is for: scientists have put cellphone-equivalent tracking on monarch butterflies, and the radio-pulse tag now weighs less than half a gram, which is to say less than the butterfly’s own opinion about flying.
The mechanics deserve to be stated plainly, because they are better than most phone plans. The tag emits a Bluetooth pulse. Ordinary devices — the smartphone in your pocket, the radios in passing cars, actual cellphone towers — pick the pulse up and quietly report it to the researchers. Nobody had to sign anything. The butterflies’ roaming coverage is provided, free of charge, by the general public.
“It’s citizen science, but crowd-powered,” said Jennifer Weber, a researcher at the university’s Conservation Management Institute, who named several of the tagged butterflies and follows their journeys the way the rest of us follow weather. A butterfly named Sneezy, tagged in the New River Valley in September, pinged from Mexico on Oct. 17. Two others, Addison and Sleepy, checked in from Texas and now seem to be traveling outside the range of cell service, an inconvenience so familiar to rural Americans that no one has stopped complaining about it, including, apparently, the butterflies. Hahn reached Alabama. Sandman reached South Carolina. Orion and Walker made it through Georgia and its weather before angling west again.
The traveler of the cohort is a monarch named Thomas, tagged on Army post land near Fredericksburg and expected to take the scenic Gulf Coast route. He was last seen in Mississippi. Then, in Weber’s telling, “he pinged yesterday at lunchtime all the way across the gulf,” a thousand miles away in southern Mexico — picked up, researchers believe, by a swirling storm system and simply delivered, like freight. “Imagine our shock,” Weber said. The point of no return, it turns out, is also a connection.
Local reaction has been warm. A rideshare driver in Roanoke said he had just learned from the radio that his phone might be carrying butterflies, and asked whether they could at least use the highway corridors like everyone else does. A radio host in Blacksburg urged listeners to leave their Bluetooth on, “for the monarchs, and for the children watching us.” One woman, calling in, wanted to know if the butterflies could hear her. Researchers clarified that they could not — the tags send only a number and a location, no voice — which the caller called a relief, and the researchers did not contradict.
The wing-sticker system, by comparison, still works like a message in a bottle: a tiny note on a wing asks whoever finds the butterfly to write back, and a small number of people do. The estimated survival rate for the tagged cohort this far is 25 to 28 percent, which researchers report as normal, and which explains why a butterfly crossing two countries on the strength of strangers’ pockets feels less like wildlife biology and more like the country’s best trait, accidentally measured.
Shawn Kurtzman, the institute researcher who outfitted 35 monarchs for the project, says the flight paths — hundreds of data points each — will finally show where the butterflies rest and feed between ridgelines. Weber plans to share all of it, and ended the interview with the sentence that should be printed on every phone in the coverage area: “We’re all kind of throwing our data in the same pot. Hopefully, that data will be available for anyone who needs it so we can help these little guys.”