October 7, 2010 • 20 mins
Each year, monarch butterflies fly south across North America, returning north in the spring. Normally the butterflies would never live long enough to complete the journey -- yet these are not normal times. Tune in to learn more about monarch butterflies.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is alisam matter Milk for the Science and how
staff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed
writer at how staff works dot com. And today is
(00:23):
a recording it's fall is approaching here in Atlhama, Georgia.
Well yeah, hopefully eventually. Well, you know, it tends to
take it sweet time. Actually, is today the very first
day of fall. Maybe nobody told nature about this because
it took pretty warm out there. What do you think
if any think of fall? I tend to think of
(00:44):
falling leaves. I tend to think of fresh apple cider.
I think of Halloween and uh, you your Halloween custome. Right.
We talked about this the other day, working on it,
work on it? Are you going to reveal? Okay? Can
I reveal what I want you to be for? Okay?
Go ahead? Well, so, yeah, and albino werewolf. How killer
(01:05):
of a costume would that be? I totally think you
should be an albino warewolf. There have no albino warewolves,
and like in films before, I was not aware of this. Yeah,
I don't know what the film. I distinctly remember seeing
a picture of somebody dressed up as like a white warewolf. Yeah,
and yeah, are you calling me an original? No, it's
it's a cool idea, especially if you like went. I
(01:26):
think even better would be if you went like Edgar
Winner's werewolf kind of a thing. That would be kind
of cool, no doubt. So. One of the things that
I think of when it comes to fall is butterflies,
and specifically the awesome monarch butterfly. And I'm not just
thinking you have any monarch butterfly, but specifically the ones
native to North America, the ones who undertake this crazy, crazy,
(01:49):
crazy track across countries um and that that spans thousands
of miles. So just Dremnor, most of you guys can
picture monarch um. But it's the bright orange and black
butterfly known scientifically as de Now's plexipus. I'm going to say,
also has these tiny little white spots on its wings,
but it's the most noticeable coloration is the black and orange.
(02:09):
That's kind of its trademark. And they may have been
around as long as two million years ago according to
the w w F Conservation Organization, So we totally surpass
are measly human existence totally. And uh, of course we
have some listeners in Australia. I'm sure they have. They
have a different name for the te Yeah, they're called
water butterflies, or they're often often called maybe some you know,
(02:34):
rebellious Australians might call them monarchs, but I don't know,
like they definitely makes more sense that they're wanderers rather
than monarchs, because what's what's very there's nothing really regal
about them except they're pretty looking, right, oh, Robert, Well
they are they denigrating the monarch already and we haven't
even gotten into they know, and they don't even have
like a system of rules, like just there they're butterflies. Which, incidentally,
(02:55):
when we were talking about the title for this monarch
excited for for the Border, I did kind of have
an image of you know, Queen Elizabeth or something you know,
high tail in it for Mexico, like a stolen vehicle
or something. So specifically we wanted to talk about the
the awesome migration that these North American monarchs do every year. Yeah,
(03:16):
it's pretty incredible. Um, you've wrote about this for Life.
Back when we did the Life series, I wrote an
article about this to go along with the BBC Discovery
show Life, and they did a whole bit with with
these guys. Oh yeah, it was pretty awesome. Yeah, they
caught up with them in Mexico, though not in Atlanta. Yeah,
if you if you guys want to catch the footage,
(03:37):
I highly recommend going to Orich to the Discovery Life
site because you can still catch some of the migration
footage and it's really really amazing. We'll get to it
in a second. But if you look at a tree, um,
it kind of looks like the leaves have become orange
and black because it's just so heavily populated with with monarchs.
I mean, there's just it's just like this dense carpet
(03:57):
of of monarchs on a tree. But we'll get to
that in second. Get ahead of myself. So this whole
migration is of monarchs. They're kind of like snow birds.
That's what I was thinking of. You know that Seinfeld episode, Well,
they're multiple in which book A Raton is referenced and
Jerry's parents are always heading for dull Booka Vista. So
get snowy up north and then old people go south
(04:18):
to where it's warm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the butterflies
are doing the same, and there's a lot of them
new Yeah, how many we're talking like a billion monarchs
make this trip every year, right, Yeah, it's tough to
it's tough to gauge monarchs and count them accurately. But
I mean I have heard numbers as high as a billion.
I thought they were counting them and there's like one
dude any like whenever the bah. Yeah, yeah, that would
(04:42):
be a tricky job. And why don't they migrate? Well,
obviously they migrate to avoid dying. Their cold blooded and
they can't survive the wintry tubs. And in fact, if
you consider their their origination in the American tropics, this
all kind of makes sense. So as we're recording this
podcast in Atlanta, Georgia, did you know we are entering
the peak of monarch migration season. Yeah. There's a cool website,
(05:06):
an organization that keeps chock of monarchs and it's called
monarch Watch. I think it's running out of Kansas, and
so they give you, um the peak season for monarch
watching according to your latitude in the northern hemisphere, So
right now, yeah, end of September through early October for
Atlanton's cool. Now, this is a this is a pretty
long journey though, I mean because to get from I mean,
(05:27):
even if you're a human on an airplane, they can
be kind of a lengthy flight. But if you're like
this tiny little insect just beating your wings like crazy, right, right,
So consider consider the source. Right, Monarchs, you know, like
to live in the North. American monarch lives as far
north as Canada and um all over the United States.
So they're taking a truck that can be as many
(05:48):
as two thousand miles. I've heard it up to three
thousand miles, depending up on where they're based. So it's
a really, really, really long journey. And it's long for
any animal out there, and not just you know one
in the insect world, although it is one of the few,
you if not only insects that makes this migration, that
makes a migration like this. So, and just to be clear,
like the the the butterfly that sets off on this
(06:11):
thousand journey in the North, it's the same butterfly that
arrives in the South. Yeah, and then and and in
its over wintering grounds. Um. And so I wish I
put this in human perspective I mean consider that for humans, Um,
most of us know, like the longest distance that's a
human my own as a marathon. Right, if you're a
crazy runner, then maybe we're talking like an ultra marathon
(06:33):
something in the realm of ko. Okay, so here's something crazy.
When I was doing a little research on ultramarathons, they
have a race and and the basis of this race
is that you're supposed to run as far as you
can in twenty four hours. Okay, okay, So that's just
that just seems a little crazy. Are you racing a
mon art butterfly the whole time? No? No, But I
(06:55):
mean to think about humans, this is like the farthest
sur running and it's really nothing compared to him on
our ex journey. It's just not I mean, any further
distances that we go. We have a car called a
road trip, or we buy a plane ticket, or we
hop on a bike or a train. You can get
the idea. Sometimes when you take a long trip, you
you put things off for that trip, you know, like
I've you know, some people say stop shaving for the
(07:18):
duration of the vacation because they're on vacation. Right, my
daddy needs to do that. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, you
were talking about the other day. And uh and and
some people, um, and this is not maybe not a
conscious thing, but some people kind of stop going to
the bathroom while their own vacation. Seriously, you haven't heard.
Oh yeah, I guess they have part of it. You know,
you're you're either you're on the move or a strange place,
(07:40):
and suddenly things aren't really going at the same like
frequency as they normally do. But these butterflies, the monarchs,
they take it to a whole new level. Like what
what do these guys put off doing? Yeah, that's true,
but yeah, they put off mating and dying and dying. Yeah.
So okay, so while all of us are, you know,
thinking about fall things. We're thinking about you pumpkins and
(08:01):
Halloween costumes and albino werewolves, there's this whole generation of monarchs,
a special generation of monarchs that's busy hatching from eggs.
They're growing into caterpillars. They're hanging out for a while
as a pupils to wait out the transformation until they
finally emerge as butterflies. It's monarch butterflies. So only after
this whole overwintering seven months long journey is complete, can
(08:24):
they write? Can they carry on the cycle of life
and death and reproduction. Yeah. It would be like if
a human took on a project and they were like,
well it would take me two lifetimes to complete this,
and you just your body decided to let you live
for two lifetimes to complete this really important task. Yeah,
it's really really interesting. I mean, so you wind up
with this dichotomy in monarch generations. You have the one
(08:45):
that kind of you know, feeds on milkweed and flutters
around and mats and lace eggs and stuff like that,
and then you have the other one that lives for months.
And to give it that's a really hard journey, Like
it's not really it up to a lot of fun,
you know. I guess it gets to see the see
a lot more, you know, of the of the countryside.
(09:06):
But yeah, I gets to see a lot of the countryside,
probably a lot more than you know, some of our
fellow countrymen have seen. Yeah, so your your lifespan for
just a regular old monarch one who's not making that
journey is gonna be four or five weeks. But like
we're talking about with the Methuselah generation, You're they're going
to live to as long as seven or eight months,
(09:27):
so in human terms. See even like this, you when
when you were writing this article for the Life series,
you're comparing it to somebody living maybe to the right
old age of a hundred, which is kind of a
long lifespan for a human. And then if you were
born in this Methusela generation as a human, you would
live to be a couple of centuries old. That's a
really long life. Yeah, it's really And I can't help
(09:48):
but think of like like sci fi possibilities for this,
you know, it's like instead of you know, frequently you
see like you know, people go on some sort of
like space journey and they freeze themselves to spend an animation,
suspended animation and all that to survive the trip. But
like what if they just like you know, through genetic
tinkering or something just like took on an extra long
lifespan to see their way through the journey. You know. Well,
(10:11):
another interesting part of the journey, which well we'll talk
about in a little bit is that while they're overwintering
in in Mexico or in California and they're kind of
roosting in these trees and these giant swarms of monarchs.
They're they're a little sluggish. They're not in hibernation per se.
A lot of naturalists will call it torpoor I believe. Um,
So it's just this kind of slower um metabolism going on.
(10:34):
You know, they're just they're chilling out a little bit.
The monarchs are. Yeah, they're just kicking back and taking
it easy. So here's something interesting. How do they know
when it's time to motor. Yeah, they can't just you know,
check their email and say, oh, today's today, or look
on a calendar. They have to use a much more
biological means, right, Yeah, So one guess, I mean, we
haven't figured this out entirely. Um, there's a guess out
(10:57):
there that they have a body clock. And this body
clock is basically made of proteins, and the proteins run
on sunlight. So as your days are getting shorter and
fall is really getting into the rhythm, the protein clock, Um,
it's rhythm changes and the monarchs respond by picking up
sticks right in their navigational system also takes advantage of
that body clock. Right allows them to get their bearings
according to the sun's position in the sky and I
(11:20):
think navigate accordingly. Yeah, and so there are a couple
of other factors that people think might influence monarch migration
and direction and navigational like good stuff, including wind of course,
and then the Earth's magnetic field and also a little
atmospheric pressure factoring into to see that the monarch gets
where it's going. Okay, so we we've talked a little
(11:41):
bit about it. But where they headed, well, butterflies living
west of the Rocky Mountains are likely headed to California
coast to back to Cali and then the divide is
so on the east side of the Rockies they're heading
for central Mexico and to central Mexican states in general,
generally speaking, you're going to find them in these unique forests.
(12:03):
They're called O m L for us. If you're if
you're heading to Mexico and I had no idea what
an O m L forest is, and it's it's one
filled with om L first or basically there's these are
just trees that like high altitudes UM and there aren't
really a whole lot of these um O m L
furs or the OML forest UM. You might also find
a couple of like cedar or pine or oak trees
(12:25):
in these forests. According to w w F, the conservation
organization and not the Wrestling Federation never really have anything
to do with this. But but yeah, that the sad
part is that these um, these forests are disappearing, right, yeah,
thanks to stuff like you know, deforestation and logging and
all that. And if the thing is is that even
though some of these lands have been designated as butterfly preserves, UM,
(12:46):
they're still feeling the effects. So what do they need
in a roosting spot? Like why are they picking these
very specific spots in California and Mexico. Well, there, the
trees are a good place to stay there. You know,
they provide good shelter, you know, berry against the wind
and the weather because they need to like chill out
and they like crank things down a notch and just
kind of be sluggish for a little bit. Yeah. And
(13:08):
also at that high altitude there's there's a lot of
cloud cover and there's also some cool weather coming in,
so they like that that moisture and then the cool
temperature again kind of lets them take it down a
notch and conserve energy. And UM. A lot of times
the omal forests are going to have some sort of
local watering hole that they've got to drink, right, right,
(13:28):
And then the best part is you get a lot
of your fellow monarchs to keep pea company. That's right.
They're they're in these uh if you you know, look
up photos or certainly if you watch the footage from Life,
you'll see that they're just huge masses of them in
the trees. Like the tree just looks alive with butterfly,
I mean it is alive with butterflies. And and then
they'll suddenly shift from one tree to then to another
(13:49):
due to something, you know, small disturbance, and it's just
really beautiful. But there's so many of them. Yeah, so
it's just like like just you know, huddling together at
a you know, football game for right, right, If they
fall off the tree, they're in trouble when nightfalls and
the temperature drops. There was a did you do you
remember the footage again from Life? Sorry for happying those guys,
but there they show it time lapse photography where the
(14:11):
yea one falls down and he's doomed and just sort
of so then um, once they've stayed there roughly until March,
things start to warm up, they get their metabolism kicking
back up a notch. And what's the first thing they do?
Lay their eggs and some milkweed a little mat right,
and then they get on with the dying, right, Yeah,
(14:36):
monarchs get on with the put it off long enough
and now it's time to just you know, pack it up.
Yeah again. I think this is really just one of
the coolest things in the natural world, one of the
coolest journeys in the natural world. It is indeed, I
mean just the whole idea that it's like one generation
lives super long to just take this incredible journey. I mean,
(14:58):
especially on an insect. Well, it's like it's pretty amazing
when you look at the migrations that birds, uh, you know,
just regularly go on. But these these guys are just
it just kind of boggles the mind. Like I get
I get lost just you know, trying to get the
grocery store, you know, and these guys are are you
going across the globe? Yeah, and passing on the knowledge
of where their home is originally? Right, Because your matthiusella
(15:22):
generation is going to wind up dying, so then you're
going to have successive generations that head back to maybe
some corner of Canada or wherever they're from. So it's
so interesting. I think that's something that we can definitely
learn from monarch migration, Like how are they passing this
information down from generation to generation? How I would like
to know a little bit more detail on how the
how the navigation system works. Yeah, and what triggers the
(15:44):
Methuselah generation, you know, like what what special thing like
could you could you take the monarch butterfly and like
like like just put its, you know, eggs in the
right place. Well, I mean I knew some of the
research definitely suggests that it's the physiological changes that are
special to this generation um relate to temperature, plan and
central Yeah. So what would you hope to learn from
(16:07):
this crazy migration? I mean it definitely holds stuff for
space travel. Well yeah, potentially. I don't know how far
fetched it is, but I can't help but think of that.
You know, it's like the idea of of somehow extending
you know, the human lifespan for a particular important purpose.
You know, it'd be or kind of like, uh, I
think back to the Ender's Game, you know, like the
(16:28):
whole deal. They had a character in that who was
really important to the human race, and they're like, how
can we make this guy stick around longer? And they
came up with a a relativity based answer to that problem.
But like, what if we were in a position to
to just pick particular people They're like, hey, the scientists
is really important, or you know, we really we really
(16:49):
love Stephen Hawking. We want him to stick around for
an extra century, you know, until he gets all of
his work done. So we we find a way to
to trigger those changes. Well maybe one kind of informal experience.
What we could do is we could, you know, just
send them all to Mexico and kind of let them
hang out on trees for a couple of months and
see how that, you know, influences their lifetime. When you think, yeah,
(17:09):
that's perfectly saying, Uh so that about wraps it up
for our crazy migration. Um, I kind of listener mail.
Oh let's have it listener mail. Yeah. So I got
a cool listener email from Australian Madeline, and she wrote
(17:29):
to tell us, among a couple of things, that she
was listening to one of our older books, Sniffers podcast.
And so after listening to the book sniffing. She decided
to try it on her mouth textbook because of the
diyes and man made paper. I nearly faded. Do not
sniff your math textbook or your maths textbook. Yeah, so
we're glad you lived to tell us about a madeline
(17:51):
and left handed listener. I just love it when when
listeners right in and tell me they're their handedness. Yeah,
you're you're nodding because you're writing. You don't like it
kite as much. But Brian, left handed listener, Brian right
in to tell us, Um, we're I guess we're talking
about shoelaces in our altruism podcast. Yeah, yeah, we were
talking because we read that listener email about the she
(18:13):
learned to tire went to this twelve or so um,
and so Brian word in to tell us that there's
in fact a correct way to tie your shoelaces. And
I bet it's the lefty way, right. No, it's a
there's a video on a Runners Road magazine and asked
to do with these, um the not the kind of
knot that you tie. I had not heard of this,
(18:34):
no pun intended. Um, yeah, it's like it has to
do with reef knots and granny knuts and apparently if
you're tying granny knots and no good. I was always
horrible at knots. I think I got the merit badge
for it when I was in Scouts, but I was,
I was horrible. An I don't I have to I
can tie a square or not, but I have to
like take a running start at it. And hey, let's
(18:56):
end with the joke. Because sometimes we really really liked
the good science jokes. So we had a listener Mike
l right in with a couple and uh, here here
is one of my favorites. Um, yes, why are astronomers
considered to be loners? Why are astronomers considered to be loners?
Because they like their personal space. So I thought it
(19:20):
ahead to do with like personal grooming or something. Listen
on a high note, If you guys have a joke
you want to send us or anything else about the
wonderful world of butterflies and migraining animals, send us a email.
Science Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Yeah or yeah,
check us out on Facebook where we're stuff in the
Science Lab, or you can also find us on Twitter
where we are lab stuff and we love to keep
(19:40):
that updated with all sorts of cool science stuff. So
that's all. Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
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blogs on the how stopeworks dot com homepage
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is alisam matter Milk for the Science and how
staff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed
writer at how staff works dot com. And today is
(00:23):
a recording it's fall is approaching here in Atlhama, Georgia.
Well yeah, hopefully eventually. Well, you know, it tends to
take it sweet time. Actually, is today the very first
day of fall. Maybe nobody told nature about this because
it took pretty warm out there. What do you think
if any think of fall? I tend to think of
(00:44):
falling leaves. I tend to think of fresh apple cider.
I think of Halloween and uh, you your Halloween custome. Right.
We talked about this the other day, working on it,
work on it? Are you going to reveal? Okay? Can
I reveal what I want you to be for? Okay?
Go ahead? Well, so, yeah, and albino werewolf. How killer
(01:05):
of a costume would that be? I totally think you
should be an albino warewolf. There have no albino warewolves,
and like in films before, I was not aware of this. Yeah,
I don't know what the film. I distinctly remember seeing
a picture of somebody dressed up as like a white warewolf. Yeah,
and yeah, are you calling me an original? No, it's
it's a cool idea, especially if you like went. I
(01:26):
think even better would be if you went like Edgar
Winner's werewolf kind of a thing. That would be kind
of cool, no doubt. So. One of the things that
I think of when it comes to fall is butterflies,
and specifically the awesome monarch butterfly. And I'm not just
thinking you have any monarch butterfly, but specifically the ones
native to North America, the ones who undertake this crazy, crazy,
(01:49):
crazy track across countries um and that that spans thousands
of miles. So just Dremnor, most of you guys can
picture monarch um. But it's the bright orange and black
butterfly known scientifically as de Now's plexipus. I'm going to say,
also has these tiny little white spots on its wings,
but it's the most noticeable coloration is the black and orange.
(02:09):
That's kind of its trademark. And they may have been
around as long as two million years ago according to
the w w F Conservation Organization, So we totally surpass
are measly human existence totally. And uh, of course we
have some listeners in Australia. I'm sure they have. They
have a different name for the te Yeah, they're called
water butterflies, or they're often often called maybe some you know,
(02:34):
rebellious Australians might call them monarchs, but I don't know,
like they definitely makes more sense that they're wanderers rather
than monarchs, because what's what's very there's nothing really regal
about them except they're pretty looking, right, oh, Robert, Well
they are they denigrating the monarch already and we haven't
even gotten into they know, and they don't even have
like a system of rules, like just there they're butterflies. Which, incidentally,
(02:55):
when we were talking about the title for this monarch
excited for for the Border, I did kind of have
an image of you know, Queen Elizabeth or something you know,
high tail in it for Mexico, like a stolen vehicle
or something. So specifically we wanted to talk about the
the awesome migration that these North American monarchs do every year. Yeah,
(03:16):
it's pretty incredible. Um, you've wrote about this for Life.
Back when we did the Life series, I wrote an
article about this to go along with the BBC Discovery
show Life, and they did a whole bit with with
these guys. Oh yeah, it was pretty awesome. Yeah, they
caught up with them in Mexico, though not in Atlanta. Yeah,
if you if you guys want to catch the footage,
(03:37):
I highly recommend going to Orich to the Discovery Life
site because you can still catch some of the migration
footage and it's really really amazing. We'll get to it
in a second. But if you look at a tree, um,
it kind of looks like the leaves have become orange
and black because it's just so heavily populated with with monarchs.
I mean, there's just it's just like this dense carpet
(03:57):
of of monarchs on a tree. But we'll get to
that in second. Get ahead of myself. So this whole
migration is of monarchs. They're kind of like snow birds.
That's what I was thinking of. You know that Seinfeld episode, Well,
they're multiple in which book A Raton is referenced and
Jerry's parents are always heading for dull Booka Vista. So
get snowy up north and then old people go south
(04:18):
to where it's warm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the butterflies
are doing the same, and there's a lot of them
new Yeah, how many we're talking like a billion monarchs
make this trip every year, right, Yeah, it's tough to
it's tough to gauge monarchs and count them accurately. But
I mean I have heard numbers as high as a billion.
I thought they were counting them and there's like one
dude any like whenever the bah. Yeah, yeah, that would
(04:42):
be a tricky job. And why don't they migrate? Well,
obviously they migrate to avoid dying. Their cold blooded and
they can't survive the wintry tubs. And in fact, if
you consider their their origination in the American tropics, this
all kind of makes sense. So as we're recording this
podcast in Atlanta, Georgia, did you know we are entering
the peak of monarch migration season. Yeah. There's a cool website,
(05:06):
an organization that keeps chock of monarchs and it's called
monarch Watch. I think it's running out of Kansas, and
so they give you, um the peak season for monarch
watching according to your latitude in the northern hemisphere, So
right now, yeah, end of September through early October for
Atlanton's cool. Now, this is a this is a pretty
long journey though, I mean because to get from I mean,
(05:27):
even if you're a human on an airplane, they can
be kind of a lengthy flight. But if you're like
this tiny little insect just beating your wings like crazy, right, right,
So consider consider the source. Right, Monarchs, you know, like
to live in the North. American monarch lives as far
north as Canada and um all over the United States.
So they're taking a truck that can be as many
(05:48):
as two thousand miles. I've heard it up to three
thousand miles, depending up on where they're based. So it's
a really, really, really long journey. And it's long for
any animal out there, and not just you know one
in the insect world, although it is one of the few,
you if not only insects that makes this migration, that
makes a migration like this. So, and just to be clear,
like the the the butterfly that sets off on this
(06:11):
thousand journey in the North, it's the same butterfly that
arrives in the South. Yeah, and then and and in
its over wintering grounds. Um. And so I wish I
put this in human perspective I mean consider that for humans, Um,
most of us know, like the longest distance that's a
human my own as a marathon. Right, if you're a
crazy runner, then maybe we're talking like an ultra marathon
(06:33):
something in the realm of ko. Okay, so here's something crazy.
When I was doing a little research on ultramarathons, they
have a race and and the basis of this race
is that you're supposed to run as far as you
can in twenty four hours. Okay, okay, So that's just
that just seems a little crazy. Are you racing a
mon art butterfly the whole time? No? No, But I
(06:55):
mean to think about humans, this is like the farthest
sur running and it's really nothing compared to him on
our ex journey. It's just not I mean, any further
distances that we go. We have a car called a
road trip, or we buy a plane ticket, or we
hop on a bike or a train. You can get
the idea. Sometimes when you take a long trip, you
you put things off for that trip, you know, like
I've you know, some people say stop shaving for the
(07:18):
duration of the vacation because they're on vacation. Right, my
daddy needs to do that. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, you
were talking about the other day. And uh and and
some people, um, and this is not maybe not a
conscious thing, but some people kind of stop going to
the bathroom while their own vacation. Seriously, you haven't heard.
Oh yeah, I guess they have part of it. You know,
you're you're either you're on the move or a strange place,
(07:40):
and suddenly things aren't really going at the same like
frequency as they normally do. But these butterflies, the monarchs,
they take it to a whole new level. Like what
what do these guys put off doing? Yeah, that's true,
but yeah, they put off mating and dying and dying. Yeah.
So okay, so while all of us are, you know,
thinking about fall things. We're thinking about you pumpkins and
(08:01):
Halloween costumes and albino werewolves, there's this whole generation of monarchs,
a special generation of monarchs that's busy hatching from eggs.
They're growing into caterpillars. They're hanging out for a while
as a pupils to wait out the transformation until they
finally emerge as butterflies. It's monarch butterflies. So only after
this whole overwintering seven months long journey is complete, can
(08:24):
they write? Can they carry on the cycle of life
and death and reproduction. Yeah. It would be like if
a human took on a project and they were like,
well it would take me two lifetimes to complete this,
and you just your body decided to let you live
for two lifetimes to complete this really important task. Yeah,
it's really really interesting. I mean, so you wind up
with this dichotomy in monarch generations. You have the one
(08:45):
that kind of you know, feeds on milkweed and flutters
around and mats and lace eggs and stuff like that,
and then you have the other one that lives for months.
And to give it that's a really hard journey, Like
it's not really it up to a lot of fun,
you know. I guess it gets to see the see
a lot more, you know, of the of the countryside.
(09:06):
But yeah, I gets to see a lot of the countryside,
probably a lot more than you know, some of our
fellow countrymen have seen. Yeah, so your your lifespan for
just a regular old monarch one who's not making that
journey is gonna be four or five weeks. But like
we're talking about with the Methuselah generation, You're they're going
to live to as long as seven or eight months,
(09:27):
so in human terms. See even like this, you when
when you were writing this article for the Life series,
you're comparing it to somebody living maybe to the right
old age of a hundred, which is kind of a
long lifespan for a human. And then if you were
born in this Methusela generation as a human, you would
live to be a couple of centuries old. That's a
really long life. Yeah, it's really And I can't help
(09:48):
but think of like like sci fi possibilities for this,
you know, it's like instead of you know, frequently you
see like you know, people go on some sort of
like space journey and they freeze themselves to spend an animation,
suspended animation and all that to survive the trip. But
like what if they just like you know, through genetic
tinkering or something just like took on an extra long
lifespan to see their way through the journey. You know. Well,
(10:11):
another interesting part of the journey, which well we'll talk
about in a little bit is that while they're overwintering
in in Mexico or in California and they're kind of
roosting in these trees and these giant swarms of monarchs.
They're they're a little sluggish. They're not in hibernation per se.
A lot of naturalists will call it torpoor I believe. Um,
So it's just this kind of slower um metabolism going on.
(10:34):
You know, they're just they're chilling out a little bit.
The monarchs are. Yeah, they're just kicking back and taking
it easy. So here's something interesting. How do they know
when it's time to motor. Yeah, they can't just you know,
check their email and say, oh, today's today, or look
on a calendar. They have to use a much more
biological means, right, Yeah, So one guess, I mean, we
haven't figured this out entirely. Um, there's a guess out
(10:57):
there that they have a body clock. And this body
clock is basically made of proteins, and the proteins run
on sunlight. So as your days are getting shorter and
fall is really getting into the rhythm, the protein clock, Um,
it's rhythm changes and the monarchs respond by picking up
sticks right in their navigational system also takes advantage of
that body clock. Right allows them to get their bearings
according to the sun's position in the sky and I
(11:20):
think navigate accordingly. Yeah, and so there are a couple
of other factors that people think might influence monarch migration
and direction and navigational like good stuff, including wind of course,
and then the Earth's magnetic field and also a little
atmospheric pressure factoring into to see that the monarch gets
where it's going. Okay, so we we've talked a little
(11:41):
bit about it. But where they headed, well, butterflies living
west of the Rocky Mountains are likely headed to California
coast to back to Cali and then the divide is
so on the east side of the Rockies they're heading
for central Mexico and to central Mexican states in general,
generally speaking, you're going to find them in these unique forests.
(12:03):
They're called O m L for us. If you're if
you're heading to Mexico and I had no idea what
an O m L forest is, and it's it's one
filled with om L first or basically there's these are
just trees that like high altitudes UM and there aren't
really a whole lot of these um O m L
furs or the OML forest UM. You might also find
a couple of like cedar or pine or oak trees
(12:25):
in these forests. According to w w F, the conservation
organization and not the Wrestling Federation never really have anything
to do with this. But but yeah, that the sad
part is that these um, these forests are disappearing, right, yeah,
thanks to stuff like you know, deforestation and logging and
all that. And if the thing is is that even
though some of these lands have been designated as butterfly preserves, UM,
(12:46):
they're still feeling the effects. So what do they need
in a roosting spot? Like why are they picking these
very specific spots in California and Mexico. Well, there, the
trees are a good place to stay there. You know,
they provide good shelter, you know, berry against the wind
and the weather because they need to like chill out
and they like crank things down a notch and just
kind of be sluggish for a little bit. Yeah. And
(13:08):
also at that high altitude there's there's a lot of
cloud cover and there's also some cool weather coming in,
so they like that that moisture and then the cool
temperature again kind of lets them take it down a
notch and conserve energy. And UM. A lot of times
the omal forests are going to have some sort of
local watering hole that they've got to drink, right, right,
(13:28):
And then the best part is you get a lot
of your fellow monarchs to keep pea company. That's right.
They're they're in these uh if you you know, look
up photos or certainly if you watch the footage from Life,
you'll see that they're just huge masses of them in
the trees. Like the tree just looks alive with butterfly,
I mean it is alive with butterflies. And and then
they'll suddenly shift from one tree to then to another
(13:49):
due to something, you know, small disturbance, and it's just
really beautiful. But there's so many of them. Yeah, so
it's just like like just you know, huddling together at
a you know, football game for right, right, If they
fall off the tree, they're in trouble when nightfalls and
the temperature drops. There was a did you do you
remember the footage again from Life? Sorry for happying those guys,
but there they show it time lapse photography where the
(14:11):
yea one falls down and he's doomed and just sort
of so then um, once they've stayed there roughly until March,
things start to warm up, they get their metabolism kicking
back up a notch. And what's the first thing they do?
Lay their eggs and some milkweed a little mat right,
and then they get on with the dying, right, Yeah,
(14:36):
monarchs get on with the put it off long enough
and now it's time to just you know, pack it up.
Yeah again. I think this is really just one of
the coolest things in the natural world, one of the
coolest journeys in the natural world. It is indeed, I
mean just the whole idea that it's like one generation
lives super long to just take this incredible journey. I mean,
(14:58):
especially on an insect. Well, it's like it's pretty amazing
when you look at the migrations that birds, uh, you know,
just regularly go on. But these these guys are just
it just kind of boggles the mind. Like I get
I get lost just you know, trying to get the
grocery store, you know, and these guys are are you
going across the globe? Yeah, and passing on the knowledge
of where their home is originally? Right, Because your matthiusella
(15:22):
generation is going to wind up dying, so then you're
going to have successive generations that head back to maybe
some corner of Canada or wherever they're from. So it's
so interesting. I think that's something that we can definitely
learn from monarch migration, Like how are they passing this
information down from generation to generation? How I would like
to know a little bit more detail on how the
how the navigation system works. Yeah, and what triggers the
(15:44):
Methuselah generation, you know, like what what special thing like
could you could you take the monarch butterfly and like
like like just put its, you know, eggs in the
right place. Well, I mean I knew some of the
research definitely suggests that it's the physiological changes that are
special to this generation um relate to temperature, plan and
central Yeah. So what would you hope to learn from
(16:07):
this crazy migration? I mean it definitely holds stuff for
space travel. Well yeah, potentially. I don't know how far
fetched it is, but I can't help but think of that.
You know, it's like the idea of of somehow extending
you know, the human lifespan for a particular important purpose.
You know, it'd be or kind of like, uh, I
think back to the Ender's Game, you know, like the
(16:28):
whole deal. They had a character in that who was
really important to the human race, and they're like, how
can we make this guy stick around longer? And they
came up with a a relativity based answer to that problem.
But like, what if we were in a position to
to just pick particular people They're like, hey, the scientists
is really important, or you know, we really we really
(16:49):
love Stephen Hawking. We want him to stick around for
an extra century, you know, until he gets all of
his work done. So we we find a way to
to trigger those changes. Well maybe one kind of informal experience.
What we could do is we could, you know, just
send them all to Mexico and kind of let them
hang out on trees for a couple of months and
see how that, you know, influences their lifetime. When you think, yeah,
(17:09):
that's perfectly saying, Uh so that about wraps it up
for our crazy migration. Um, I kind of listener mail.
Oh let's have it listener mail. Yeah. So I got
a cool listener email from Australian Madeline, and she wrote
(17:29):
to tell us, among a couple of things, that she
was listening to one of our older books, Sniffers podcast.
And so after listening to the book sniffing. She decided
to try it on her mouth textbook because of the
diyes and man made paper. I nearly faded. Do not
sniff your math textbook or your maths textbook. Yeah, so
we're glad you lived to tell us about a madeline
(17:51):
and left handed listener. I just love it when when
listeners right in and tell me they're their handedness. Yeah,
you're you're nodding because you're writing. You don't like it
kite as much. But Brian, left handed listener, Brian right
in to tell us, Um, we're I guess we're talking
about shoelaces in our altruism podcast. Yeah, yeah, we were
talking because we read that listener email about the she
(18:13):
learned to tire went to this twelve or so um,
and so Brian word in to tell us that there's
in fact a correct way to tie your shoelaces. And
I bet it's the lefty way, right. No, it's a
there's a video on a Runners Road magazine and asked
to do with these, um the not the kind of
knot that you tie. I had not heard of this,
(18:34):
no pun intended. Um, yeah, it's like it has to
do with reef knots and granny knuts and apparently if
you're tying granny knots and no good. I was always
horrible at knots. I think I got the merit badge
for it when I was in Scouts, but I was,
I was horrible. An I don't I have to I
can tie a square or not, but I have to
like take a running start at it. And hey, let's
(18:56):
end with the joke. Because sometimes we really really liked
the good science jokes. So we had a listener Mike
l right in with a couple and uh, here here
is one of my favorites. Um, yes, why are astronomers
considered to be loners? Why are astronomers considered to be loners?
Because they like their personal space. So I thought it
(19:20):
ahead to do with like personal grooming or something. Listen
on a high note, If you guys have a joke
you want to send us or anything else about the
wonderful world of butterflies and migraining animals, send us a email.
Science Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Yeah or yeah,
check us out on Facebook where we're stuff in the
Science Lab, or you can also find us on Twitter
where we are lab stuff and we love to keep
(19:40):
that updated with all sorts of cool science stuff. So
that's all. Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our
blogs on the how stopeworks dot com homepage
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