New butterfly tagging technology turns hypotheses to facts for KU’s Monarch Watch – The Lawrence Times
https://lawrencekstimes.com/2026/05/30/monarch-watch-butterfly-tags/
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 15:53:00
Source Domain: lawrencekstimes.com
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Outfitted with a little eyelash glue and tiny, solar-powered radio tagging devices, Kristen Baum will be able to watch the progress of a monarch butterfly that hatched from an egg laid in her backyard as it flies across the country.
Baum is a professor at the University of Kansas and the director of Monarch Watch, an education, conservation and research program connected to the university.
She and her team have joined the Project Monarch Collaboration alongside scientists through the United States, Canada and Mexico to solve long-standing puzzles about monarch migration.
Their current spring project was preceded by a fall initiative to place radio tags on monarchs headed south. Ten of the 30 butterflies Baum and her team tagged last year soared all the way to Mexico, with a handful making it to overwintering sanctuaries like the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.
Jacob Rice / Lawrence Times Kristen Baum
From hypothesis to fact
Baum pulled up the tracking software on her computer and played a time-lapse.
At the start of the fall project, a few dots begin to appear on the map in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, before sprouting offshoots, each representing the path of an individual butterfly.
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Jacob Rice / Lawrence Times Baum shows the software tracking the spring migration of monarch butterflies.
Baum pointed out one monarch that hadn’t shown up since October in Corpus Christi, Texas, but reappeared on the radar in January in an overwintering sanctuary.
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The tagging technology, she said, doesn’t allow researchers to capture precise butterfly locations at any moment, but its capabilities far exceed other tagging methods that generally only capture the start or end point of a monarch’s path.
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