Here is the biography of our monarch butterfly expert, Dr. Karen Oberhauser. You are welcome to send questions about monarchs to her at:
Dr. Karen Oberhauser is a Research Associate at the University of Minnesota. She has studied monarch biology for the past 10 years, and still has enough questions to keep her busy for another 10 years! She has learned that female monarchs can lay over 1100 eggs during their life, but that the average for females in captivity is about 700. These eggs are laid over an adult lifespan of four to six weeks. Even though neither parent provides any care for their offspring after the eggs are laid, females are careful to lay their eggs on the correct hostplant, and males actually provide some nutrients to the female during mating.
Karen and her students are also working on understanding how a protozoan parasite affects monarchs and how it is transmitted from females to their offspring. This parasite can be a real problem for people who raise monarchs in captivity, and it is also present in wild populations. Other current projects in her lab are learning what triggers the physiological changes in the monarchs that migrate instead of reproducing, and studying larval pigmentation.
Karen remembers collecting monarch larvae as a child, and, despite hours of watching them just before they formed their pupae or emerged as adults, never actually seeing either of these events. Now that her research involves rearing hundreds of monarchs at a time, she has seen them often, as have her eight and five year-old daughters, Amy and Leah. She feels that witnessing such amazing natural events, and being involved in a project like the Journey North, is a wonderful way to interest people in conservation and science.
For the past several years, Karen has worked with teachers and their students who are interested in keeping monarchs in their classrooms or who want to learn more about monarchs or other insects. She is involved in a nationwide project to promote studying monarch butterflies as a way to get students more interested in biology and the environment, and welcomes questions from people who want to get involved in this project.
If anyone is interested in contacting Karen about using monarchs in their classrooms, they can write to her at
University of Minnesota Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior St. Paul, MN 55108
Journey North 125 North First Street Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 Phone: (612)339-6959