Monarch Watch is a nonprofit education, conservation, and research program based at the University of Kansas that focuses on the monarch butterfly, its habitat, and its spectacular fall migration.
Founded in the fall of 1992, their mission is to provide the public with as much information about monarch butterflies & their spectacular migration.
The Monarch Watch Tagging Program, also initiated in 1992, is a large-scale community project intended to help us understand the dynamics of the monarch's fall migration through mark and recapture.
Monarch tagging was originally used by Dr. Fred Urquhart of the University of Toronto help locate overwintering monarchs and later to determine where monarchs came from that wintered in Mexico.
Monarch Watch's long-range tagging program reveals much more! Tagging helps answer questions about the origins of monarchs that reach Mexico, the timing and pace of the migration, mortality during the migration, and changes in geographic distribution. It also shows that the probability of reaching Mexico is related to geographic location, size of the butterfly, and the date (particularly as this relates to the migration window for a given location).
In order to be able to associate the geographic "mark" location with that of any subsequent recapture, each butterfly tagged must be uniquely coded with a "TagCode". A new series of unique codes is generated for each tagging season and printed using permanent inks on all-weather tags with a pressure-sensitive adhesive backing. When applied as directed, the tags do not interfere with flight or otherwise harm the butterflies.
Each fall a quarter of a million tags are distributed to thousands of volunteers across North America who tag monarchs as they migrate through their area. While we're on the tail end of the monarch migration, we here at Rolling Hills Zoo have tagged 49 monarch butterflies this year!
