The overwintering season started a bit earlier this year! Since the last days of October, hundreds of butterflies could be seen from the roads around the MBBR flying towards the forests. This spectacular arrival continued for two more weeks and ended the weekend of November 13-14 when the colonies were already established. The colonies will be officially open to tourism until November 27 in Sierra Chincua, El Rosario, and La Mesa and Cerro Pelón will remain closed. In the photo below, taken in the Monarch Reserve’s buffer zone by Isabel Ramírez, we see some monarchs on Buddleia flowers making a last stop before heading to the overwintering sites.

 

We are incredibly proud to be a part of the #GivingTuesday movement. Help us make this day memorable by clicking here to support reforestation and Carlitos pictured below.

 

Carlitos, the boy portrayed in our GlobalGiving page is all grown up now and continues planting trees! You can read his thoughts about reforestation by clicking HERE

The overwintering season started a bit earlier this year! Since the last days of October, hundreds of butterflies could be seen from the roads around the MBBR flying towards the forests. This spectacular arrival continued for two more weeks and ended the weekend of November 13-14 when the colonies were already established. The colonies will be officially open to tourism until November 27 in Sierra Chincua, El Rosario, and La Mesa and Cerro Pelón will remain closed. In the photo below, taken in the Monarch Reserve’s buffer zone by Isabel Ramírez, we see some monarchs on Buddleia flowers making a last stop before heading to the overwintering sites.

 

With initial funding from MBF through its Monarch Butterfly Flight Challenge, a group of engineers and biologists from the University of Michigan is developing a remarkable system for determining the daily flight path of migrating monarchs. This group has made a tiny solar-powered sensor – so small that it is only one-tenth the weight of an adult monarch and equal to the weight of a flake of uncooked oatmeal – and when a sensor is attached to the back (dorsal thorax) of a butterfly, it records time, temperature, and light each day wherever the butterfly is located.  Thus, when a sensor-bearing monarch is in range of a detector at the end of the migration, the data from the monarch’s migratory path can be downloaded and its location determined for each day.

We are excited about what this system can tell us about monarch migration and its implications for improving our conservation efforts, and we are delighted that the Flight Challenge spurred development of this new technology.

The abstract of the group’s newest publication is accessible by clicking HERE.

Dr. Cuauhtémoc Saénz-Romero and Dr. Arnulfo Blanco-García, along with OKRAM media producers, made a video describing their assisted migration experiments. These experiments are exploring how planting oyamel fir trees at different elevations affect their growth and survival to prepare for future climatic changes that may occur and improve reforestation efforts in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. MBF is proud to be among the many organizations that are supporting this exciting and important research! To read more details about this research and watch another video go to our current projects/scientific research section by clicking  HERE.