Latest Monarch Stories

It's a common assumption that animal migration, like human travel across the globe, can transport pathogens long distances, in some cases increasing disease risks to humans. West Nile Virus, for example, spread rapidly along the East coast of the U.S., most likely due to the movements of migratory birds. But in a paper just published in the journal Science, researchers in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology report that in some cases, animal migrations could actually help reduce...

Monarch butterflies appear to use medicinal plants to treat their offspring for disease, research by biologists at Emory University shows. Their findings were published online Oct. 6 in the journal Ecology Letters."We have shown that some species of milkweed, the larva's food plants, can reduce parasite infection in the monarchs," says Jaap de Roode, the evolutionary biologist who led the study. "And we have also found that infected female butterflies prefer to lay their eggs...

Conservation groups said on Monday that monarch butterflies are facing a new threat from severe storms that have devastated some sanctuary forests in Mexico. The Nature Conservancy said during a news conference that storm damage in Mexico's 32,124-acre monarch reserve has presented another blow to the butterflies, which arrived in Mexico in record low numbers last season after a 2,000-mile journey from Canada. Omar Vidal, head of World Wildlife Fund Mexico said that 289 acres were damaged...

Monarch butterflies "” renowned for their lengthy annual migration to and from Mexico "” complete an even more spectacular journey home than previously thought.New research from the University of Guelph reveals that some North American monarchs born in the Midwest and Great Lakes fly directly east over the Appalachians and settle along the eastern seaboard. Previously, scientists believed that the majority of monarchs migrated north directly from the Gulf coast.The study appears in the...

HOUSTON, June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- The Monarch School's students, families and teachers are celebrating the A+ earned recently by the school's new Chrysalis building for going green. Chrysalis is the first special education facility in the United States to achieve the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Gold certification. Before Chrysalis' opening less than a year ago, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized the green school with its rarely awarded "Designed to Earn the...

LONG BEACH, Calif., April 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Monarch HealthCare of Orange County has been named this year's recipient of SCAN Health Plan's "Wave" award, presented annually to a medical group that combines "high levels of performance or improvement in the field of geriatrics" with a "strong commitment to care for seniors and SCAN members." The award was presented at the annual meeting of SCAN's Geriatric Advisory Board. Unique in its composition and charter, the advisory board is...

Forget top-to-bottom only. New Cornell University evolutionary biology research shows how plants at the bottom of the food chain have evolved mechanisms that influence ecosystem dynamics as well. (Science, March 26, 2010.)"The ecology and interactions of most organisms is dictated by their evolutionary history," said Anurag Agrawal, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), the study's senior author.In food webs, predators help suppress populations of prey by...

Traveling long distances spurs the evolution of larger and pointier wingsA University of Georgia study has found that monarch butterflies that migrate long distances have evolved significantly larger and more elongated wings than their stationary cousins, differences that are consistent with traits known to enhance flight ability in other migratory species.As part of a National Science Foundation and UGA-funded study, researchers in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the...

UMass Medical School neurobiologists use transgenic fruit flies and monarch butterfly transgenes to help define magnetoreception mechanismBuilding on prior investigation into the biological mechanisms through which monarch butterflies are able to migrate up to 2,000 miles from eastern North America to a particular forest in Mexico each year, neurobiologists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) have linked two related photoreceptor proteins found in butterflies to animal...

LUTON, England, Dec. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- It would seem that not everyone is dreaming of a white Christmas this year as award winning low fares airline Monarch gets set to fly almost 140,000 customers to warmer climes in Europe for the festive period. Between Friday 18 December and Monday 04 January 10, Monarch will operate 1,724 scheduled flights to some of Europe's key hotspots with top destinations this year being Tenerife, Malaga and Alicante, where temperatures of up to 21 degrees C will...