Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  Anecdotal science may not have been good science, may not have been science at all, but it yielded interesting questions, and in some instances it led to crucial answers. But when the Urquharts were getting out of the business, it seemed that a whole tradition was ending. Monarch biology was becoming the province of academics. Lincoln Brower, for one, was working on sophisticated methods of chemical ecology. And while Bill Calvert was off in the woods making field notes, he was no amateur, either. In Mexico he was known as Doctor Calvert. Even Robert Michael Pyle, the lepidopterist who, more than anyone, was able to introduce laypeople to the beauty and the natural history of butterflies through his Audubon field guides, though unaffiliated with any university, had the distinction of a doctorate from Yale.

  Enter Chip Taylor—Dr. Orley Taylor—of the University of Kansas, a man who would look like Father Christmas if Father Christmas wore crisp blue oxford shirts and khaki pants and snacked on bee pollen. And if his workshop were crowded with amber jars of aminoacetic acid and hexane and syringes and microscopes and caged butterflies and “Far Side” cartoons (“Ten Reasons to become an entomologist: number three: Only about a billion species to worry about”) and a window box crawling with bees, all attended by a dozen elves who looked remarkably like midwestern college kids. Taylor was professor of biology and an expert on “killer” bees. But in the summer of 1992, after nearly twenty years of bee research, he was looking to move in another direction. “I was exploring several options when Brad Williamson, a high school biology teacher from Kansas City, showed up, and we began discussing monarchs,” Taylor recalled. “The Urquhart program was fading, and it didn’t appear that the Urquharts would ever summarize their data—or share them. We discussed initiating a tagging program and Brad insisted we had to do it differently—develop a broader base and involve students. I was a bit skeptical, but the idea appealed to the educator in me and we initiated a tagging program with our own money and some I had set aside from an income account maintained with the endowment association. I didn’t envision Monarch Watch when I started—or becoming a monarch researcher or expert myself.” But that was what happened.

  ON THE WALL of a narrow office on the seventh floor of Haworth Hall at the University of Kansas was a map of North America that looked like a rendering of long-and short-haul trucking routes. Scores of colored lines connect places like Duluth, Minnesota, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Olathe, Kansas, and Gun Barrel, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana, and El Rosario, Mexico; and Orion, Illinois, and Abilene, Texas. The one line that wasn’t there—not in visible ink, at least—joins Toronto, Canada, to Lawrence, Kansas: Fred Urquhart’s hometown to Chip Taylor’s. This poster, though formally titled “Forty Years of Monarch Recoveries,” was also a map of Chip Taylor’s life for nearly a decade. It showed just how much of a monarch researcher he had unwittingly become.

  In the summer of 1992, though, Taylor was still basically a bee man, and a little too shy to get in touch with the Urquharts. “Their summaries were getting shorter each season,” he said, “and nothing new was being generated, and no summaries of the overall data seemed imminent. In fact, when Fred and Norah stopped their program, Fred was widely quoted as saying nothing had been or could be learned from the recoveries in the U.S. The data say otherwise. Fred simply didn’t have the insight, or collaborators who did, to sort the data to reveal the patterns therein.” Taylor and Williamson issued press releases that appeared in newspapers from Minnesota to Texas, recruiting volunteers. They were interested less in establishing that monarchs from the North ended up in Mexico than in finding the routes and the azimuths by which they got there.

  Once the newspaper articles came out, the phones began to ring in Haworth Hall. Most volunteers were schoolteachers looking to use monarchs in their classrooms, but there were unaffiliated individuals as well. Monarch Watch—the name Taylor and Williamson gave to their project—took off in ways that neither man had foreseen. In its first year a few thousand butterflies were tagged; five years later the number approached a hundred thousand. By then actual, real, crucial, and sometimes anecdotal evidence about flyways, flight and weather patterns, and endurance had been added by Taylor’s amateur minions to the scientific record.

  In this effort, however, unlike most scientific endeavors, the outcome was less critical than the process. Taylor was tired of teaching bright university students who could answer the questions put to them on standardized tests but had no idea how those questions had been formulated in the first place. He wanted a project that was unscripted, that would not merely engage young people but inspire them to think scientifically. “All I’m doing is trying to provide a building block,” Taylor said one day as he walked through the West Campus greenhouse checking his milkweed seedlings. There were hundreds of them. “When I was thirteen I decided honeybees were very interesting and I was going to learn everything about them. I badgered my mother to take me to the library and I got out all the books on bees and read them over and over again. I’ve got passion in my soul, and that’s what I’m trying to inspire with Monarch Watch. Passion. That’s why I like beekeepers. They’re passionate.”

  Outside the greenhouse monarchs were chasing one another and nectaring on purple thistle and basking in the sun. There were pearl crescents and buckeyes and cloudless sulfurs, too, and cabbage whites and viceroys. As Taylor walked through the field, all manner of insect life buzzed around him, or lit on his shirt, as if he were Saint Francis of the invertebrates. He picked a honeybee off an aster and held it to my ear. I drew away, taking one large step backward. Taylor laughed and turned it over. “It’s a male,” he said. “No stinger.” Two paces later he stopped and knelt by a small, leafy cottonwood and beckoned me over. “See that?” he said. No, I didn’t. “Look at the underside of the leaf,” he instructed. He turned it over and there was a nearly microscopic pearl—the egg of a viceroy butterfly. This might have been an entomological parlor trick, but I was impressed nonetheless. “How did you know it would be there?” I asked dumbly. “Because when I was twelve I taught myself which butterflies lay eggs on which plants,” Taylor said. “Viceroys prefer small, young cottonwoods.” “Oh,” I said, almost walking into a trap laid by the menacing (I thought) orb weaver spider that was presiding over two dead monarchs suspended from her web, shrouded in white silk like bodies ready for burial.

  The greenhouse milkweed was necessary for one of Monarch Watch’s sideline—and somewhat controversial—businesses, sending larvae to schools and individuals eager to raise their own caterpillars and watch them transform themselves into butterflies. Controversial because the larvae, which were also being raised in the West Campus greenhouse, were being shipped all over the country to be released into the wild population, where they posed the danger of infusing strange or nonadapted genes into a local population or causing bacterial infections. Although thousands went out the door of Haworth Hall each year, Taylor was convinced that they were not statistically significant (“Nevertheless,” he urged members of Monarch Watch, “we should be cautious and under no conditions should we release diseased monarchs into the natural population”). In any case, Taylor understood that dominion, even dominion over a small insect, could be a route to passion: maybe some of the people who raised these monarchs would care enough about their fate to learn more about the Mexican preserves or about pesticide use in the United States or about the use of transgenic crops. Maybe some of them would become field biologists themselves, or zoologists, or ecologists. Taylor saw himself as a teacher, a mentor, an inspiration. The caterpillars were essential.

  “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 othe
r 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.”

  BECAUSE 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 writ
ten 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.