CAPE MAY POINT — As millions of monarch butterflies arrive in Mexico, 500 of the insects are tagged with ultralight BluMorpho and Blu+ transmitters to help scientists gather individual-level data on their migration navigation.
The Cape May Point Arts & Science Center (CMPASC) and Cellular Tracking Technologies (CTT) started Project Monarch in 2021 as a local initiative to use test transmitters to track butterflies as they travel thousands of miles to reach Mexico to overwinter. Smartphone users can download the Project Monarch app to follow butterflies with tracking devices.
The humble project has reached a historic milestone, achieving the most comprehensive tracking study of monarch butterfly migration ever conducted. CMPASC and CTT have collaborated with multiple monarch researchers spanning the United States, Canada, Cuba and Mexico.
“We’re so fortunate to have [Cellular Tracking Technologies] as partners,” CMPASC President Bob Mullock said. “I never expected [Project Monarch] to explode as it has, for the good.”
CTT research and development scientist Sean Burcher, who also is science director at CMPASC, said he knew they were onto something unique, given the different paradigm for tracking wildlife compared to how it has been done previously.
“Also making it into a community science tool and putting it into the hands of people who can download the app and see the data coming in real time,” Burcher said. “We knew we would make a splash in the scientific community; we didn’t realize it was going to go beyond that.”
CMPASC donors enabled the project’s success and continue to sustain the work. These investments laid the groundwork for the project’s expansion and this year’s scientific breakthrough.
Deploying transmitters
CTT has refined its deployment of the monarch transmitters over the past three years. Individual monarchs are caught for tagging demonstrations. The butterflies are safely immobilized to add the ultralight tracker, which is done with eyelash glue.
“We glue the tag to the back of the monarch and hold a couple minutes until it sets, and then release the monarch,” Burcher said, adding that 75 butterflies were tagged the first year.
CMPASC purchased the first BluMorpho tag ever to be placed on an animal, Burcher said, noting it took place in the CMPASC courtyard during a tagging demonstration.
Collaboration efforts
When the tagging project reached its second year, Burcher said it expanded to eight groups across the United States, with 200 tags deployed.
This year saw 500 butterflies tagged, from Canada, the eastern United States, California and Cuba.
“It’s an international collaboration with over 26 collaborators,” he said. “It’s a who’s who of monarch researchers. It’s all the most established and experienced monarch researchers that have joined on our project.”
One collaborator, Environment and Climate Change Canada, deployed 30 transmitters early in the season. Burcher said the monarchs in Canada are starting to move earlier than those farther south.
“We saw the most incredible data: the monarchs flew right across Lake Erie and were streaming down the Midwest,” Burcher said. “We were watching this data coming in and we knew we had to act.”
David La Puma, CTT vice president of sales, marketing and customer service, began reaching out to scientists across the country and beyond to help get tags out to researchers, who would, in turn, collaborate with Project Monarch and publish the collective dataset.
Burcher said they immediately began shipping tags to researchers, with the agreement to be a part of the collaboration. The group effort would result in the collective data set being published.
Information includes such things as “how monarchs migrate, the speed, timing, direction, how they move, and which habitats are important to them on the way down to Mexico,” Burcher said. “It helps not only answer questions about pure monarch biology, but how to [focus] conservation and what kind of policy can be enacted to bring their numbers back up to what they used to be.”
The overarching goal of Project Monarch is to increase populations.
“With the tracking, we want to follow up with people who are involved in saving wildlife and would put in pollinator gardens along the [monarchs’ migration path],” Mullock said, adding that the next aspect will be working with gardening groups.
The organizations will be able to garner a list of plants that will be beneficial to monarch butterflies and other insects on a similar migration pathway.
Mullock said they have partnered with Estela Romero Vásquez, a fifth-generation resident of Angangueo, Michoacán, Mexico, a town adjacent to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve World Heritage Site. The area is known for the overwintering concentration of monarch butterflies.
“She came to the science center and gave a great presentation of what it means, not only scientifically but also what it means to them culturally,” Mullock said. “In their culture, the monarch butterflies represent the hearts and souls of people who have passed and are returning to their villages.”
Behind the scenes
While the monarch migration data is being collected, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes.
“These tags are many years in the making to get them that small and light, and that’s just the hardware to get all the software and servers set up so we can get all the data back, and develop the mobile app in the hands of people,” Burcher said.
In addition to the technical work, CMPASC is raising money to fund these projects. Burcher said the donors have been vital to getting the project off the ground and continuing to launch projects of this scale.
Looking forward
It’s a homegrown story, with work that started in Cape May Point and across Cape May County, putting the town on the map at the forefront of monarch research.
“Cape May has had a very long history of monarch research,” Burcher said. “The Monarch Monitoring Project was started by New Jersey Audubon and has run for decades. Cape May Point is known for it throughout the world.”
Burcher noted that Project Monarch’s efforts have doubled each year since it started, and he believes the sky is the limit.
“The Cape Island community and all of New Jersey can be really proud that they’re playing a role in protecting an important butterfly that will not be extinct because of the efforts of all of these people,” Mullock said, adding the Cape May County Board of Commissioners has helped fund several videos the groups have released to help people understand the importance of the project.
Next year, CMPASC hopes to bring together all collaborators to present the historic dataset that has been collected.
CMPASC will host the 2026 Wildlife Conservation Film Festival from June 11-14.
“It is an international project that will introduce our area to all these efforts going on around the world and will introduce the rest of the world to Cape Island, where all these things are taking place,” Mullock said. “It’s so important that people in Cape May County gave us their support to help make this happen.”
By RACHEL SHUBIN/Special to the Star and Wave
