UA Faculty, Students Observe Massive Winter Gathering of Monarch Butterflies in Mexico’s Central Mountains

Standing in the midst of swarming monarch butterflies, high in the central volcanic mountains of Mexico, Robert Wiedenmann said he felt like he was in a blizzard.

“But the snowflakes were four inches across and black and orange,” Wiedenmann said.

Wiedenmann, head of the entomology department of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture and Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, with colleagues from Purdue University, the University of Kentucky and the Illinois Natural History Survey, led a group of entomology graduate students Jan. 3-7 to two mountain preserves where millions of monarchs from the U.S. and Canada spend the winter.

The butterfly preserves are near Angangueo in the state of Michoacan, about 150 miles west of Mexico City. The group visited the Chincua preserve, located at an elevation of about 11,000 feet, and El Rosario, between 12,000 and 13,000 feet.

“All monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains, about three-quarters of the population in North America, migrate to these mountains every winter,” Wiedenmann said. “It’s one of the true biological spectacles of the world.”

“A trip like this lets the students see this amazing natural event and, at the same time, experience a culture very different from their own,” Wiedenmann said.

To read more, please go to http://www.uark.edu/depts/agripub/Publications/Agnews/agnews07-3.html