tagging experiment

Paul Cherubini cherubini at mindspring.com
Sat Jan 15 05:25:47 EST 2000


John Lane wrote:

> Jacob: When you first posted the "news" on the IBBA web site, I thought
> it said the eastern wild-caught stock released at Paonia, CO came from
> Waverly, IA.

All the eastern wild-caught monarchs that were released in Paonia, Colorado
came from Waverly, Iowa. Jacob Groth had state and federal permits for
every release he was involved with. But he had nothing to do with the
Iowa to Colorado transfer. I did this one without a permit because
the United States Dept.of Agriculture would not grant one. Up to now
USDA , like the monarch scientists, had assumed the Rocky Mountains
were a great barrier to monarch movement and would not consider
allowing eastern monarchs to be released west of the continental
divide even for an experiment intended to test this presumption.

In establishing this strict policy around 1993-94, USDA had consulted
with monarch authorities such as Dr's. Karen Oberhauser and Chip Taylor.
On July 5 last summer,  Karen indicated her passionate opposition to
transfer studies when she posted the following statement to the dplex-list:
"as a scientist and as a citizen committed to doing everything I can to
preserving the phenomenon of monarch migration, I am unwilling to
take the risk or to condone such studies."

But, none of the monarch scientists (e.g. Brower, Taylor,
Oberhauser, Pyle, Altizer, etc.) who are so strongly opposed
to experimental monarch transplants has been willing to come
forward with evidence or a model (acceptable to an insect
pathologist or invertebrate geneticist)  explaining how harm from
a transfer of 5,000 monarchs could occur. Thus Jacob Groth, myself
and other monarch workers are left unable to understand
the scientific basis of their very serious concerns.

Below is Dr. Karen Oberhauser's July 5, 1999 post in it's entirety:

"As a scientist, I would love to know the answer to the question
of whether there are genetic difference between the eastern and
western monarch populations in responses to migratory cues.
However, I can only think of one way, using our current
understanding of monarch migration, to get a definitive answer to
this question - releasing large numbers of monarchs from different
natal origins in places other than those in which they would find
themselves naturally. At this point, we don't know enough about
the natural cues used by monarchs to duplicate them in the lab, so the
releases would need to be in "the wild". Large numbers of butterflies
would be needed because the recovery rate is very low."

"Clearly, the most interesting comparison would be between monarchs
from the eastern and western populations. However, the potential
problems with such a release have been pointed out often, and
are well-summarized in a BioScience Article by Brower et al
(1995, 45:540-544; see also further discussion of this point in
the September 1996 issue of BioScience); these problems include
risk of transferring diseases which occur in different frequencies in
different populations, and the chance that such transfers could make
 it difficult or impossible to study many aspects of basic monarch
genetics and population structure."

"It is, of course, possible that large-scale studies would not impact
monarch populations in irreversible or harmful ways. However,
as a scientist and as a citizen committed to doing everything I can
to preserving the phenomenon of monarch migration, I am unwilling
to take the risk or to condone such studies."


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