Mapping monarchs
Ohio State student discovers how butterflies get from Ohio to Mexico
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Since she was a little girl, Alyssa LaRue has been fascinated by butterflies.
LaRue, a sophomore animal sciences major at Ohio State, is particularly taken with monarchs, the orange, black, and yellow butterflies commonly found in Ohio during the summer months.
Each fall, she watches them gather on trees at her family's Pickaway County farm--sometimes as many as 50 at a time. A day or two later, they're all gone, having traveled to Mexico for the winter.
"They're so tiny and fragile, and they migrate all that distance," LaRue says. She wanted to find out how butterflies make the 3,000-mile trip.
So in ninth grade, she started working on a science fair project to answer that question.
How monarchs get from the United States to Mexico has "always been a huge debate," she says.
Some scientists have theorized that monarchs use the sun to guide them. LaRue agreed, but she thought something else also was at work: geomagnetic navigation, using the Earth's magnetic pull to find their way.
In her study, she found that monarchs have an unusually large amount of iron in their heads. That helps the butterflies find their way to central Mexico, where sanctuaries in the mountains have lots of iron ore.
With the help of researchers at Ohio State and Battelle, LaRue recently got her study published in the Ohio Journal of Science.
Now that her six-year project has wrapped up, LaRue is taking a small break. But chances are, we'll hear her name again.
"At Ohio State," she says, "the opportunities are endless and numerous people are here to help you on your path."
Related links:
Department of Animal Sciences at The Ohio State University
Office of Undergraduate Research at The Ohio State University
Apply to The Ohio State University
(text/images: University Marketing Communications)
