Four Wings and a Prayer (13 page)

“Could there be serious consequences of releasing classroom-reared monarchs in the eastern population?” Taylor asked readers of the
Monarch Watch Newsletter
in 1998. Then he rephrased it another way: “What might it take to have a genetic impact on monarchs?” These were not rhetorical questions. Taylor seemed to have an endless supply of them. Did El Niño affect monarchs? Did nectaring monarchs prefer one sugar concentration to another? Did monarchs compete with other species? Were caterpillars attracted to or repelled by light?

“We have legitimate questions to answer,” Chip Taylor said. “That’s why I put them out there. The data from an eighth-grader have the potential to be just as good as those of a retired senior citizen. There is absolutely no reason amateurs cannot get these data. I want to show that anyone can become a scientist.”

Taylor had tears in his eyes when he said this. He believed it as thoroughly as Lincoln Brower did not, and when he spoke he was like that rare political candidate who speaks with conviction, or a preacher who is full of grace. Monarchs mattered to him. Lepidoptery mattered to him. But education mattered the most.

“Science is a process of learning from your mistakes,” he said. “If I get data that’re dead wrong, I know I’m onto something. Failure tells you where to go next. Scientists forget how many mistakes they made along the way. They present their results in a refined way that doesn’t suggest they screwed up for four years.”

B
ECAUSE THE QUESTIONS
mattered to him as much as, and maybe more than, the answers, Taylor eventually got in touch with the Urquharts. He tried to, that is, sending them articles about Monarch Watch, and annual reports, and posters, and newsletters. He never heard from them. When he requested copies of the Insect Migration Association’s reports, he was rebuffed and told they were for members only, not for public consumption. The Urquharts’ collegiality, it seemed, went only so far. Taylor was disappointed. He had a hunch that all the information they had collected, once it was put together, would add up to something, though he wasn’t sure what. Something about which routes the butterflies took to Mexico. How they knew to follow those routes might come after that.

Taylor was finally able to obtain a complete set of Insect Migration Association reports, supplied to him by a former IMA research associate. He and his students got to work, mapping the course of every single butterfly that had been tagged and recaptured over the thirty years of the Urquharts’ project. A two-mile trip, a fifteen-mile trip, a trip of fifteen hundred miles—every one of them was plotted. It was like seeing a Polaroid develop, watching those lines accrue. When it was done it showed two distinct flyways east of the Rockies, one coastal, the other through the plains, two routes so consistent that they suggested to Taylor that “the monarch butterfly has a general geographic sense. If it’s blown off course it can reorient itself to get back to Mexico, like a bird that gets blown off course. That’s a pretty interesting suggestion. This is the only insect for which we have such data.”

Taylor was also intrigued by what the picture
didn’t
show. There was a huge hole in the map east of New Orleans, north to St. Louis, east to Virginia. No monarch from that area had yet been recovered in Mexico. That was critical because Taylor “sensed” that latitude, as well as longitude, factored into the monarchs’ trip to the Transvolcanics. “The tagged data don’t meet up with our expectations regarding latitude,” he said, pointing to the map. “The butterflies ought to be turning right, right near that hole. The data suggest it, but they just don’t support it.” So Taylor was going to force the data’s hand. Or rather, his associate Dr. Sandra Perez was. Perez, a dynamic young researcher who had been a postdoc in Taylor’s lab, would be flying to Washington, D.C., and Dalton, Georgia, later in the year with about a hundred Kansas butterflies on ice. After spending three days in a mesh tent to acclimatize, the monarchs would be released, and Perez would record which way they flew. Would they behave like Kansas monarchs and continue heading south, or would they behave like Taylor supposed southeastern butterflies should behave, and head more westerly? Perez was guessing they’d go south; Taylor was betting they’d head west. A beer was riding on the outcome, but the experiment was still some months off.

“This whole monarch thing is so weird,” Perez said one afternoon in Lawrence, having driven in from Tucson, where she was completing a second postdoc (on ants), to consult with Taylor, with whom she continued to collaborate on monarchs. “No one ever asks me about my dissertation, ever. Do you want to know the title? It’s ‘The Risk-Sensitive Foraging Behavior of Carpenter Bees.’ So then I work in this lab for a few months and boom, everyone is interested in what
I’m doing. You just say the words
monarch butterfly,
and people are interested.”

Perez, though, was being modest. She said the words
monarch butterfly
and people listened because she happened to say them to the three million listeners of National Public Radio. It was May 1997, and she was standing in a field in Kansas, releasing butterflies and then running after them with a compass as the reporter ran after her with a microphone. Perez was conducting a clock-shifting experiment. Under Chip Taylor’s guidance, she had collected a number of migrating monarchs and kept them in the lab for nearly two weeks, changing the light and dark cycles to confuse them into believing they were in a different time zone—Hawaii’s, by my calculation. Perez had two control groups as well. One was kept in the lab without being clock-shifted; the other consisted of migrants captured in the wild and kept outdoors.

The question Perez and Taylor were asking was quite simple: Do migrating monarch butterflies use the sun to guide them to their winter homes? To find out, Perez released the butterflies one at a time and ran after them till they were out of sight, recording the way they were headed. The heading—the direction in which the monarch’s body was pointing, even if it was being buffeted sideways or backward by the wind—was key, since routine vanishing bearings had proved deceptive. Captive monarchs, especially those with low body temperatures, were notoriously weak fliers. They tried to go a certain way but were not powerful enough to succeed.

“When you take vanishing bearings, you get false information,” Perez said. “It can’t accommodate the wind. Basically you’re getting wind direction. The body orientation
and the vanishing bearings were markedly different, so I started to record the body orientation—the heading—as well, and when I did, some patterns started to show up. The vanishing bearings of the animals in the wild were what we expected, but the vanishing bearings of the butterflies we had cooled down in storage were all over the place. But their headings were all the same. Once I realized this, I started to do orientation studies looking at headings, not at vanishing bearings.”

Once Perez began to do this, the results were pretty stunning. It was midafternoon on a sunny day in an open field on the Lawrence campus. She released the control monarchs. They flew in the predicted south-southwesterly direction, the direction of the Mexican overwintering sites. So far, so good. Then she began releasing the clock-shifted butterflies, and one by one they began to head west-northwest. They behaved, in other words, as if it were nine in the morning. To Taylor’s question “Do monarch butterflies use the sun to orient themselves?” Perez’s data seemed to chorus a resounding “Yes!”

“The week the sun-compass story aired on NPR, a guy I didn’t know showed up in my lab in Tucson wearing a suit and tie,” Perez said. “He said he was working on some kind of nanoplane for some agency in Washington and he thought this biological information might be applicable. I guess he thought the sun compass was the tip of the iceberg, but in fact as far as I was concerned it was the whole iceberg.

“A lot of people didn’t believe we were getting these results, because they weren’t able to get them. They said it was impossible. But I didn’t know it was impossible, so I did it.”

Adrian Wenner was one of these. A professor emeritus of natural history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Wenner was unconvinced by Sandra Perez’s results. To anyone familiar with the monarch world, this was not surprising. Wenner was a professional naysayer, a gadfly and critic, the one person least likely to be impressed by
anyone’s
data. This negativity wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t spurious. Wenner was a thoughtful, courteous man—and he was smart, endowed with the kind of searing intelligence that one hopes not to cross. Wenner took one look at the clock-shifting experiment and began to tick off its flaws. At first he said nothing, though it disturbed him to see the experiment written up in
Nature,
which he had thought had more exacting standards. But when the
Los Angeles Times
picked up the story, that was too close. Wenner began openly to debunk the experiment, arguing that it was not statistically significant, that the statistical analysis was flawed, and that the whole enterprise was biased because Perez “knew” in which direction migrating monarchs were “supposed” to move, knowledge that might have influenced her outcomes.

“It seems to me that we keep ‘getting the cart in front of the horse,’ “ Wenner wrote to Chip Taylor shortly after the
L.A. Times
piece ran, “letting theory rather than evidence drive interpretation.” Wenner also took the data and put them through other statistical analyses and came up with nothing: these tests did not show the data to be statistically significant. In other words, if these tests had been substituted for the one Perez had used, the conclusion would have been contrary to hers. This was another complaint of Wenner’s: if data were analyzed in three different ways and only one of those tests indicated significance, the scientist was free to discard
the results of the two “failed” tests. Anything that did not support the narrative could be ignored.

“Striving to find out what animals really do in nature is a far more noble pursuit than trying to ‘prove’ that they do what we might wish them to do,” Adrian Wenner wrote in a memo dated September 25, 1997, and addressed to “Those Interested in Monarch Butterfly Biology.” Although nominally commenting on the sun-compass experiment, Wenner was registering a much larger complaint. He did not accept the conventional wisdom; he did not believe that monarch butterflies migrated. He knew that the eastern population moved southward in the fall. He knew that much of the western population moved toward the coast at around the same time. But he refused to accept that in either case the movement was intentional. Intent, he believed, was a human attribute. So was wanting the story of the monarch butterfly to be more dramatic than it really was.

Wenner’s own explanation of the southward movement of eastern monarchs each fall went like this: “In the fall, monarch adults in Canada and the upper Midwest likely receive some environmental trigger (change in photoperiod or seasonal cold snap) and cease egg laying. When the main jet stream moves south out of Canada, high and low pressure cells become carried across extreme southern Canada and later across the U.S. At that time, monarchs need merely rise on thermals during clearing conditions and become carried toward the south out of the region in which they were reared. If they have reached sufficient altitude in their ride on thermals, the north winds can carry some of them considerable distances toward Mexico.” The reason they all seemed to end up in the same place in Mexico, Wenner argued, was simple:
Monarchs were found in the overwintering sites because that was where people expected to find them. In other words, they might be in other places as well, but the world was big, and who was looking?

D-PLEX,
where this discussion and the one about the sun compass and those about the effect of logging on the Mexican habitat and anything else concerning monarchs took place, was another of Chip Taylor’s inventions. There were eighteen messages posted in December 1995, the first month the site was in business. Less than four years later, in September 1999, there were eight hundred. There seemed to be no end to the controversies, the information, and the queries. Chip Taylor stayed in the background as much as possible, letting other personalities dominate, but then he would appear, fielding questions, noting unusual recoveries of tagged butterflies (in Cuba, Ireland, the Bahamas), and refereeing the fights that swept through the group now and then like the flu. (“Here’s a classic example of a double standard in the butterfly community,” a professional butterfly breeder named Rick Mikula wrote in October 1997: “butterflies transported from Michigan to Texas, which everyone will think is cute because children were involved. However, were these butterflies infected with anything? Who knows? But when a professional butterfly breeder rears butterflies under laboratory conditions, eliminating any sick stock, [he’s a] bad [person]. Under the current double standard no one turns their head when a nine-year-old releases what could be the most infected monarch at the roosting site, but [everyone] screams when someone takes their time and does it
right.” Soon afterward Lincoln Brower weighed in, directing his reply to Chip Taylor but posting it for all to see: “Rick Mikula’s e-mail message on the interchanges of monarchs borders on a lack of civility and does not advance intelligent discourse on what is a legitimate debate about the wisdom (or lack thereof) in making artificial transfers of monarch butterflies between different geographic areas in North America.” “I truly hope you did not find my response as uncivil as Dr. Brower did,” Mikula wrote back. “I did not mean it to be.… The question I posed still puzzles me. I am all for kids’ releasing butterflies, but it seems the professionals always get a bad rap. But I must say after that blasting from Dr. Brower it will certainly be the last time I respond to a posting on the list.” It wasn’t.)