OxfordPress.com

Students at McGuffey Foundation School will raise dozens of Monarch butterflies from caterpillars this month, tag them for research purposes and set them free to fly 1,700 miles from Ohio to central Mexico, where the butterflies will spend the winter and breed before returning to the United States.

Along the way, the first- and second-graders at the independent kindergarten through eighth-grade school in Oxford will learn firsthand about biology, conservation and international cooperation. 

"We've got a responsibility to help these guys get all the way down to Mexico," said Tom Klak, a McGuffey parent, as he addressed a classroom full of 6- and 7-year-olds on a recent September morning.

Many of the students peered into cupped palms, intently watching the yellow-and-black striped caterpillars crawl across their hands.

Klak, a professor of geography at Miami University, collects Monarch eggs in the wild, raises them into butterflies and tags them for Monarch Watch, a nonprofit organization based at the University of Kansas that is conducting a large-scale research project on the butterflies.

Klak said eggs that are laid in the wild and left alone have only a 1 percent chance of becoming a butterfly, due to parasites and predators, but those he raises have a 50 percent chance.

He told the students that people in Mexico who find the butterflies receive $5 if they call or mail in the identification number to Monarch Watch.

According to Monarch Watch's Web site, Monarch butterflies are seriously threatened by human activity. Development, farming practices, logging and ozone depletion have shrunk their natural habitats and severely reduced the growth of milkweed, the only plant that the caterpillars will eat.

At McGuffey, Klak handed out samples of milkweed, and told the students that they would have to go out and find the plant in order for their caterpillars to survive. Milkweed is a plant that is poisonous to many species.

When Klak asked the students why that might be, first-grader Camille Ingersoll raised her hand.

"So that birds won't eat the Monarchs?" she said.

"That right!" Klak replied.

The butterflies have toxins in their system from their earlier diet of milkweed that they are poisonous as well.

Once the caterpillars begin to hatch, the students will attach the tags, which are small and light so they don't interfere with flying, to the butterflies' wings. Klak said the Monarchs' instincts to head south are so strong that they will take off immediately.

Once airborne, they fly continuously, stopping only to bulk up on nectar from flowers. He said that by the time they reach the Transvolcanic Mountains in Mexico, they will weigh nearly four times as much as they did in Oxford. They need the extra weight to survive the winter.

The butterflies mate during the winter and then the males die — their bodies are often what the local Mexicans find and report; the females fly back to Texas, where they lay their eggs before dying. The offspring of these butterflies then travel north for the summer and it is their children who will once again make the trip to Mexico. 

At the end of his presentation, Klak taught the children to say "Bueno suerte, mariposa," which is Spanish for "Good luck, butterfly."