[Leps-l] Joe Billings Discovers Monarchs Are True Navigators
chris kline
kline_at_pine at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 4 14:24:20 EST 2013
Paul is quite intentionally painting only a partial picture of the work that is being done in the desert southwest. The link below will take you to a more complete documentation of the work being done by the Southwest Monarch Study which is who Joe tags for. Thanks.
https://www.facebook.com/SouthwestMonarchStudy
chris
Chris Kline
Sugar Grove, Ohio
To learn more about my Tony Spencer Mystery Series and my Butterfly books visit: http://beeryridge.yolasite.com
On Wednesday, December 4, 2013 1:30 PM, Paul Cherubini <monarch at saber.net> wrote:
Earlier this year Rachael Derbyshire, a Canadian graduate student, and
her faculty advisers concluded, based on flight testing in an artificial flight
simulator,
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/4354/ybo7.jpg that fall migrant monarchs
are not true navigators
http://imageshack.com/a/img208/5305/s452.jpg
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/how-monarch-butterflies-find-their-way-to-mexico-1.1302747
Here's an 8 minute interview with Rachael where she describes how
fall migrants she tested in the flight simulator in Ontario headed southwest
towards Mexico. She then drove them to Calgary, Alberta, tested them
again and found they still oriented to the southwest. So she and her
faculty advisers concluded fall migrants are not true navigators because
after being transported to Calgary the butterflies failed to head
southeast in the flight simulator, towards their final overwintering destination
in central Mexico http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2012-2013/qq-2013-04-13_03.mp3
But this fall as well as in 2008 and 2010, a self-taught naturalist, Joe Billings
of Vail, Arizona http://imageshack.com/a/img22/3729/2ksr.jpg
acquired tagging evidence that shows fall migrants are not behaviorally
locked into flying southwest or in other southerly directions in the fall to
find the refrigerator-like climates where they overwinter. The nearest
refrigerator-like winter climate to southeastern Arizona is the central
California coast and Joe found that fall migrants tagged in southeastern
Arizona during the first three weeks of September routinely fly northwest to
the overwintering sites along the cold central California coast, hence they
are true navigators. In other words, Joe's butterflies were capable of
orienting themselves in northwesterly directions - in the autumn - towards
a geographical region that is thermally suitable for keeping them alive
during the fall and winter months.
Specifically, two of a mere 51 fall migrants Joe tagged on Sept. 20, 2013
at Elgin, Arizona (near the Mexican border) were resighted at
overwintering sites on the central California coast in October and November,
hence there can be little reasonable doubt that most of them flew northwest
to the central California coast http://imageshack.com/a/img23/1631/0lcq.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img89/2118/zwys.jpg
Weather history data from http://www.wunderground.com/history/
suggests Joe's butterflies battled westerly headwinds or northerly
and southerly crosswinds during most of the journey to the central California
coast:
Surface winds:
Sept. 20: http://imageshack.com/a/img545/7279/c4z3.jpg
Sept. 21: http://imageshack.com/a/img27/2074/tr8g.jpg
Sept. 22: http://imageshack.com/a/img14/6921/5pkd.jpg
Sept. 23: http://imageshack.com/a/img856/5635/2yz8.jpg
Sept. 24: http://imageshack.com/a/img30/5476/cr86.jpg
Sept. 25: http://imageshack.com/a/img849/1089/9h7x.jpg
To date, true navigation has been shown in only a few invertebrates
such as the eastern newt, the loggerhead sea turtle and the spiny lobster.
Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.
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