Do
Only Females Migrate?
Please Contribute Your Observations
by Andy
Davis
 |
| Andy Davis with Sonia Altizer |
This spring one of my colleagues and I made an interesting observation in Georgia. We were lucky enough to capture half a dozen adult monarchs that were from the returning Mexico generation, and they all turned out to be females!
That got us wondering:
- Where are the males in the spring?
- Could this have just been a fluke, or do males really make the spring migration at all?
- Of course females have to migrate to lay the eggs of the next generation, but males may not need to accompany them.
We did some reading and we realized that such a question has never been addressed in the scientific world before, and that here we may have an opportunity to do so with the help of Journey North participants.
So we thought, what if we could have participants from the southern US email us if they catch (or have caught) a monarch this spring and tell us its gender, and the place they caught it.
- If anyone wishes to do this, they can email me at davisa@owl.forestry.uga.edu.
If we get enough observations, perhaps we could answer this interesting question and contribute another piece of the puzzle of monarch migration.
