Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is alisam matter Milk for the Science and how
Speaker 1: staff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed
Speaker 1: writer at how staff works dot com. And today is
Speaker 1: a recording it's fall is approaching here in Atlhama, Georgia.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, hopefully eventually. Well, you know, it tends to
Speaker 1: take it sweet time. Actually, is today the very first
Speaker 1: day of fall. Maybe nobody told nature about this because
Speaker 1: it took pretty warm out there. What do you think
Speaker 1: if any think of fall? I tend to think of
Speaker 1: falling leaves. I tend to think of fresh apple cider.
Speaker 1: I think of Halloween and uh, you your Halloween custome. Right.
Speaker 1: We talked about this the other day, working on it,
Speaker 1: work on it? Are you going to reveal? Okay? Can
Speaker 1: I reveal what I want you to be for? Okay?
Speaker 1: Go ahead? Well, so, yeah, and albino werewolf. How killer
Speaker 1: of a costume would that be? I totally think you
Speaker 1: should be an albino warewolf. There have no albino warewolves,
Speaker 1: and like in films before, I was not aware of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the film. I distinctly remember seeing
Speaker 1: a picture of somebody dressed up as like a white warewolf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, are you calling me an original? No, it's
Speaker 1: it's a cool idea, especially if you like went. I
Speaker 1: think even better would be if you went like Edgar
Speaker 1: Winner's werewolf kind of a thing. That would be kind
Speaker 1: of cool, no doubt. So. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I think of when it comes to fall is butterflies,
Speaker 1: and specifically the awesome monarch butterfly. And I'm not just
Speaker 1: thinking you have any monarch butterfly, but specifically the ones
Speaker 1: native to North America, the ones who undertake this crazy, crazy,
Speaker 1: crazy track across countries um and that that spans thousands
Speaker 1: of miles. So just Dremnor, most of you guys can
Speaker 1: picture monarch um. But it's the bright orange and black
Speaker 1: butterfly known scientifically as de Now's plexipus. I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: also has these tiny little white spots on its wings,
Speaker 1: but it's the most noticeable coloration is the black and orange.
Speaker 1: That's kind of its trademark. And they may have been
Speaker 1: around as long as two million years ago according to
Speaker 1: the w w F Conservation Organization, So we totally surpass
Speaker 1: are measly human existence totally. And uh, of course we
Speaker 1: have some listeners in Australia. I'm sure they have. They
Speaker 1: have a different name for the te Yeah, they're called
Speaker 1: water butterflies, or they're often often called maybe some you know,
Speaker 1: rebellious Australians might call them monarchs, but I don't know,
Speaker 1: like they definitely makes more sense that they're wanderers rather
Speaker 1: than monarchs, because what's what's very there's nothing really regal
Speaker 1: about them except they're pretty looking, right, oh, Robert, Well
Speaker 1: they are they denigrating the monarch already and we haven't
Speaker 1: even gotten into they know, and they don't even have
Speaker 1: like a system of rules, like just there they're butterflies. Which, incidentally,
Speaker 1: when we were talking about the title for this monarch
Speaker 1: excited for for the Border, I did kind of have
Speaker 1: an image of you know, Queen Elizabeth or something you know,
Speaker 1: high tail in it for Mexico, like a stolen vehicle
Speaker 1: or something. So specifically we wanted to talk about the
Speaker 1: the awesome migration that these North American monarchs do every year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty incredible. Um, you've wrote about this for Life.
Speaker 1: Back when we did the Life series, I wrote an
Speaker 1: article about this to go along with the BBC Discovery
Speaker 1: show Life, and they did a whole bit with with
Speaker 1: these guys. Oh yeah, it was pretty awesome. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: caught up with them in Mexico, though not in Atlanta. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you guys want to catch the footage,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend going to Orich to the Discovery Life
Speaker 1: site because you can still catch some of the migration
Speaker 1: footage and it's really really amazing. We'll get to it
Speaker 1: in a second. But if you look at a tree, um,
Speaker 1: it kind of looks like the leaves have become orange
Speaker 1: and black because it's just so heavily populated with with monarchs.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just it's just like this dense carpet
Speaker 1: of of monarchs on a tree. But we'll get to
Speaker 1: that in second. Get ahead of myself. So this whole
Speaker 1: migration is of monarchs. They're kind of like snow birds.
Speaker 1: That's what I was thinking of. You know that Seinfeld episode, Well,
Speaker 1: they're multiple in which book A Raton is referenced and
Speaker 1: Jerry's parents are always heading for dull Booka Vista. So
Speaker 1: get snowy up north and then old people go south
Speaker 1: to where it's warm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the butterflies
Speaker 1: are doing the same, and there's a lot of them
Speaker 1: new Yeah, how many we're talking like a billion monarchs
Speaker 1: make this trip every year, right, Yeah, it's tough to
Speaker 1: it's tough to gauge monarchs and count them accurately. But
Speaker 1: I mean I have heard numbers as high as a billion.
Speaker 1: I thought they were counting them and there's like one
Speaker 1: dude any like whenever the bah. Yeah, yeah, that would
Speaker 1: be a tricky job. And why don't they migrate? Well,
Speaker 1: obviously they migrate to avoid dying. Their cold blooded and
Speaker 1: they can't survive the wintry tubs. And in fact, if
Speaker 1: you consider their their origination in the American tropics, this
Speaker 1: all kind of makes sense. So as we're recording this
Speaker 1: podcast in Atlanta, Georgia, did you know we are entering
Speaker 1: the peak of monarch migration season. Yeah. There's a cool website,
Speaker 1: an organization that keeps chock of monarchs and it's called
Speaker 1: monarch Watch. I think it's running out of Kansas, and
Speaker 1: so they give you, um the peak season for monarch
Speaker 1: watching according to your latitude in the northern hemisphere, So
Speaker 1: right now, yeah, end of September through early October for
Speaker 1: Atlanton's cool. Now, this is a this is a pretty
Speaker 1: long journey though, I mean because to get from I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you're a human on an airplane, they can
Speaker 1: be kind of a lengthy flight. But if you're like
Speaker 1: this tiny little insect just beating your wings like crazy, right, right,
Speaker 1: So consider consider the source. Right, Monarchs, you know, like
Speaker 1: to live in the North. American monarch lives as far
Speaker 1: north as Canada and um all over the United States.
Speaker 1: So they're taking a truck that can be as many
Speaker 1: as two thousand miles. I've heard it up to three
Speaker 1: thousand miles, depending up on where they're based. So it's
Speaker 1: a really, really, really long journey. And it's long for
Speaker 1: any animal out there, and not just you know one
Speaker 1: in the insect world, although it is one of the few,
Speaker 1: you if not only insects that makes this migration, that
Speaker 1: makes a migration like this. So, and just to be clear,
Speaker 1: like the the the butterfly that sets off on this
Speaker 1: thousand journey in the North, it's the same butterfly that
Speaker 1: arrives in the South. Yeah, and then and and in
Speaker 1: its over wintering grounds. Um. And so I wish I
Speaker 1: put this in human perspective I mean consider that for humans, Um,
Speaker 1: most of us know, like the longest distance that's a
Speaker 1: human my own as a marathon. Right, if you're a
Speaker 1: crazy runner, then maybe we're talking like an ultra marathon
Speaker 1: something in the realm of ko. Okay, so here's something crazy.
Speaker 1: When I was doing a little research on ultramarathons, they
Speaker 1: have a race and and the basis of this race
Speaker 1: is that you're supposed to run as far as you
Speaker 1: can in twenty four hours. Okay, okay, So that's just
Speaker 1: that just seems a little crazy. Are you racing a
Speaker 1: mon art butterfly the whole time? No? No, But I
Speaker 1: mean to think about humans, this is like the farthest
Speaker 1: sur running and it's really nothing compared to him on
Speaker 1: our ex journey. It's just not I mean, any further
Speaker 1: distances that we go. We have a car called a
Speaker 1: road trip, or we buy a plane ticket, or we
Speaker 1: hop on a bike or a train. You can get
Speaker 1: the idea. Sometimes when you take a long trip, you
Speaker 1: you put things off for that trip, you know, like
Speaker 1: I've you know, some people say stop shaving for the
Speaker 1: duration of the vacation because they're on vacation. Right, my
Speaker 1: daddy needs to do that. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, you
Speaker 1: were talking about the other day. And uh and and
Speaker 1: some people, um, and this is not maybe not a
Speaker 1: conscious thing, but some people kind of stop going to
Speaker 1: the bathroom while their own vacation. Seriously, you haven't heard.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I guess they have part of it. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're either you're on the move or a strange place,
Speaker 1: and suddenly things aren't really going at the same like
Speaker 1: frequency as they normally do. But these butterflies, the monarchs,
Speaker 1: they take it to a whole new level. Like what
Speaker 1: what do these guys put off doing? Yeah, that's true,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they put off mating and dying and dying. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So okay, so while all of us are, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about fall things. We're thinking about you pumpkins and
Speaker 1: Halloween costumes and albino werewolves, there's this whole generation of monarchs,
Speaker 1: a special generation of monarchs that's busy hatching from eggs.
Speaker 1: They're growing into caterpillars. They're hanging out for a while
Speaker 1: as a pupils to wait out the transformation until they
Speaker 1: finally emerge as butterflies. It's monarch butterflies. So only after
Speaker 1: this whole overwintering seven months long journey is complete, can
Speaker 1: they write? Can they carry on the cycle of life
Speaker 1: and death and reproduction. Yeah. It would be like if
Speaker 1: a human took on a project and they were like,
Speaker 1: well it would take me two lifetimes to complete this,
Speaker 1: and you just your body decided to let you live
Speaker 1: for two lifetimes to complete this really important task. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really really interesting. I mean, so you wind up
Speaker 1: with this dichotomy in monarch generations. You have the one
Speaker 1: that kind of you know, feeds on milkweed and flutters
Speaker 1: around and mats and lace eggs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and then you have the other one that lives for months.
Speaker 1: And to give it that's a really hard journey, Like
Speaker 1: it's not really it up to a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: you know. I guess it gets to see the see
Speaker 1: a lot more, you know, of the of the countryside.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I gets to see a lot of the countryside,
Speaker 1: probably a lot more than you know, some of our
Speaker 1: fellow countrymen have seen. Yeah, so your your lifespan for
Speaker 1: just a regular old monarch one who's not making that
Speaker 1: journey is gonna be four or five weeks. But like
Speaker 1: we're talking about with the Methuselah generation, You're they're going
Speaker 1: to live to as long as seven or eight months,
Speaker 1: so in human terms. See even like this, you when
Speaker 1: when you were writing this article for the Life series,
Speaker 1: you're comparing it to somebody living maybe to the right
Speaker 1: old age of a hundred, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: long lifespan for a human. And then if you were
Speaker 1: born in this Methusela generation as a human, you would
Speaker 1: live to be a couple of centuries old. That's a
Speaker 1: really long life. Yeah, it's really And I can't help
Speaker 1: but think of like like sci fi possibilities for this,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like instead of you know, frequently you
Speaker 1: see like you know, people go on some sort of
Speaker 1: like space journey and they freeze themselves to spend an animation,
Speaker 1: suspended animation and all that to survive the trip. But
Speaker 1: like what if they just like you know, through genetic
Speaker 1: tinkering or something just like took on an extra long
Speaker 1: lifespan to see their way through the journey. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: another interesting part of the journey, which well we'll talk
Speaker 1: about in a little bit is that while they're overwintering
Speaker 1: in in Mexico or in California and they're kind of
Speaker 1: roosting in these trees and these giant swarms of monarchs.
Speaker 1: They're they're a little sluggish. They're not in hibernation per se.
Speaker 1: A lot of naturalists will call it torpoor I believe. Um,
Speaker 1: So it's just this kind of slower um metabolism going on.
Speaker 1: You know, they're just they're chilling out a little bit.
Speaker 1: The monarchs are. Yeah, they're just kicking back and taking
Speaker 1: it easy. So here's something interesting. How do they know
Speaker 1: when it's time to motor. Yeah, they can't just you know,
Speaker 1: check their email and say, oh, today's today, or look
Speaker 1: on a calendar. They have to use a much more
Speaker 1: biological means, right, Yeah, So one guess, I mean, we
Speaker 1: haven't figured this out entirely. Um, there's a guess out
Speaker 1: there that they have a body clock. And this body
Speaker 1: clock is basically made of proteins, and the proteins run
Speaker 1: on sunlight. So as your days are getting shorter and
Speaker 1: fall is really getting into the rhythm, the protein clock, Um,
Speaker 1: it's rhythm changes and the monarchs respond by picking up
Speaker 1: sticks right in their navigational system also takes advantage of
Speaker 1: that body clock. Right allows them to get their bearings
Speaker 1: according to the sun's position in the sky and I
Speaker 1: think navigate accordingly. Yeah, and so there are a couple
Speaker 1: of other factors that people think might influence monarch migration
Speaker 1: and direction and navigational like good stuff, including wind of course,
Speaker 1: and then the Earth's magnetic field and also a little
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure factoring into to see that the monarch gets
Speaker 1: where it's going. Okay, so we we've talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about it. But where they headed, well, butterflies living
Speaker 1: west of the Rocky Mountains are likely headed to California
Speaker 1: coast to back to Cali and then the divide is
Speaker 1: so on the east side of the Rockies they're heading
Speaker 1: for central Mexico and to central Mexican states in general,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, you're going to find them in these unique forests.
Speaker 1: They're called O m L for us. If you're if
Speaker 1: you're heading to Mexico and I had no idea what
Speaker 1: an O m L forest is, and it's it's one
Speaker 1: filled with om L first or basically there's these are
Speaker 1: just trees that like high altitudes UM and there aren't
Speaker 1: really a whole lot of these um O m L
Speaker 1: furs or the OML forest UM. You might also find
Speaker 1: a couple of like cedar or pine or oak trees
Speaker 1: in these forests. According to w w F, the conservation
Speaker 1: organization and not the Wrestling Federation never really have anything
Speaker 1: to do with this. But but yeah, that the sad
Speaker 1: part is that these um, these forests are disappearing, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks to stuff like you know, deforestation and logging and
Speaker 1: all that. And if the thing is is that even
Speaker 1: though some of these lands have been designated as butterfly preserves, UM,
Speaker 1: they're still feeling the effects. So what do they need
Speaker 1: in a roosting spot? Like why are they picking these
Speaker 1: very specific spots in California and Mexico. Well, there, the
Speaker 1: trees are a good place to stay there. You know,
Speaker 1: they provide good shelter, you know, berry against the wind
Speaker 1: and the weather because they need to like chill out
Speaker 1: and they like crank things down a notch and just
Speaker 1: kind of be sluggish for a little bit. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also at that high altitude there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: cloud cover and there's also some cool weather coming in,
Speaker 1: so they like that that moisture and then the cool
Speaker 1: temperature again kind of lets them take it down a
Speaker 1: notch and conserve energy. And UM. A lot of times
Speaker 1: the omal forests are going to have some sort of
Speaker 1: local watering hole that they've got to drink, right, right,
Speaker 1: And then the best part is you get a lot
Speaker 1: of your fellow monarchs to keep pea company. That's right.
Speaker 1: They're they're in these uh if you you know, look
Speaker 1: up photos or certainly if you watch the footage from Life,
Speaker 1: you'll see that they're just huge masses of them in
Speaker 1: the trees. Like the tree just looks alive with butterfly,
Speaker 1: I mean it is alive with butterflies. And and then
Speaker 1: they'll suddenly shift from one tree to then to another
Speaker 1: due to something, you know, small disturbance, and it's just
Speaker 1: really beautiful. But there's so many of them. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's just like like just you know, huddling together at
Speaker 1: a you know, football game for right, right, If they
Speaker 1: fall off the tree, they're in trouble when nightfalls and
Speaker 1: the temperature drops. There was a did you do you
Speaker 1: remember the footage again from Life? Sorry for happying those guys,
Speaker 1: but there they show it time lapse photography where the
Speaker 1: yea one falls down and he's doomed and just sort
Speaker 1: of so then um, once they've stayed there roughly until March,
Speaker 1: things start to warm up, they get their metabolism kicking
Speaker 1: back up a notch. And what's the first thing they do?
Speaker 1: Lay their eggs and some milkweed a little mat right,
Speaker 1: and then they get on with the dying, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: monarchs get on with the put it off long enough
Speaker 1: and now it's time to just you know, pack it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah again. I think this is really just one of
Speaker 1: the coolest things in the natural world, one of the
Speaker 1: coolest journeys in the natural world. It is indeed, I
Speaker 1: mean just the whole idea that it's like one generation
Speaker 1: lives super long to just take this incredible journey. I mean,
Speaker 1: especially on an insect. Well, it's like it's pretty amazing
Speaker 1: when you look at the migrations that birds, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: just regularly go on. But these these guys are just
Speaker 1: it just kind of boggles the mind. Like I get
Speaker 1: I get lost just you know, trying to get the
Speaker 1: grocery store, you know, and these guys are are you
Speaker 1: going across the globe? Yeah, and passing on the knowledge
Speaker 1: of where their home is originally? Right, Because your matthiusella
Speaker 1: generation is going to wind up dying, so then you're
Speaker 1: going to have successive generations that head back to maybe
Speaker 1: some corner of Canada or wherever they're from. So it's
Speaker 1: so interesting. I think that's something that we can definitely
Speaker 1: learn from monarch migration, Like how are they passing this
Speaker 1: information down from generation to generation? How I would like
Speaker 1: to know a little bit more detail on how the
Speaker 1: how the navigation system works. Yeah, and what triggers the
Speaker 1: Methuselah generation, you know, like what what special thing like
Speaker 1: could you could you take the monarch butterfly and like
Speaker 1: like like just put its, you know, eggs in the
Speaker 1: right place. Well, I mean I knew some of the
Speaker 1: research definitely suggests that it's the physiological changes that are
Speaker 1: special to this generation um relate to temperature, plan and
Speaker 1: central Yeah. So what would you hope to learn from
Speaker 1: this crazy migration? I mean it definitely holds stuff for
Speaker 1: space travel. Well yeah, potentially. I don't know how far
Speaker 1: fetched it is, but I can't help but think of that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like the idea of of somehow extending
Speaker 1: you know, the human lifespan for a particular important purpose.
Speaker 1: You know, it'd be or kind of like, uh, I
Speaker 1: think back to the Ender's Game, you know, like the
Speaker 1: whole deal. They had a character in that who was
Speaker 1: really important to the human race, and they're like, how
Speaker 1: can we make this guy stick around longer? And they
Speaker 1: came up with a a relativity based answer to that problem.
Speaker 1: But like, what if we were in a position to
Speaker 1: to just pick particular people They're like, hey, the scientists
Speaker 1: is really important, or you know, we really we really
Speaker 1: love Stephen Hawking. We want him to stick around for
Speaker 1: an extra century, you know, until he gets all of
Speaker 1: his work done. So we we find a way to
Speaker 1: to trigger those changes. Well maybe one kind of informal experience.
Speaker 1: What we could do is we could, you know, just
Speaker 1: send them all to Mexico and kind of let them
Speaker 1: hang out on trees for a couple of months and
Speaker 1: see how that, you know, influences their lifetime. When you think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's perfectly saying, Uh so that about wraps it up
Speaker 1: for our crazy migration. Um, I kind of listener mail.
Speaker 1: Oh let's have it listener mail. Yeah. So I got
Speaker 1: a cool listener email from Australian Madeline, and she wrote
Speaker 1: to tell us, among a couple of things, that she
Speaker 1: was listening to one of our older books, Sniffers podcast.
Speaker 1: And so after listening to the book sniffing. She decided
Speaker 1: to try it on her mouth textbook because of the
Speaker 1: diyes and man made paper. I nearly faded. Do not
Speaker 1: sniff your math textbook or your maths textbook. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we're glad you lived to tell us about a madeline
Speaker 1: and left handed listener. I just love it when when
Speaker 1: listeners right in and tell me they're their handedness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're nodding because you're writing. You don't like it
Speaker 1: kite as much. But Brian, left handed listener, Brian right
Speaker 1: in to tell us, Um, we're I guess we're talking
Speaker 1: about shoelaces in our altruism podcast. Yeah, yeah, we were
Speaker 1: talking because we read that listener email about the she
Speaker 1: learned to tire went to this twelve or so um,
Speaker 1: and so Brian word in to tell us that there's
Speaker 1: in fact a correct way to tie your shoelaces. And
Speaker 1: I bet it's the lefty way, right. No, it's a
Speaker 1: there's a video on a Runners Road magazine and asked
Speaker 1: to do with these, um the not the kind of
Speaker 1: knot that you tie. I had not heard of this,
Speaker 1: no pun intended. Um, yeah, it's like it has to
Speaker 1: do with reef knots and granny knuts and apparently if
Speaker 1: you're tying granny knots and no good. I was always
Speaker 1: horrible at knots. I think I got the merit badge
Speaker 1: for it when I was in Scouts, but I was,
Speaker 1: I was horrible. An I don't I have to I
Speaker 1: can tie a square or not, but I have to
Speaker 1: like take a running start at it. And hey, let's
Speaker 1: end with the joke. Because sometimes we really really liked
Speaker 1: the good science jokes. So we had a listener Mike
Speaker 1: l right in with a couple and uh, here here
Speaker 1: is one of my favorites. Um, yes, why are astronomers
Speaker 1: considered to be loners? Why are astronomers considered to be loners?
Speaker 1: Because they like their personal space. So I thought it
Speaker 1: ahead to do with like personal grooming or something. Listen
Speaker 1: on a high note, If you guys have a joke
Speaker 1: you want to send us or anything else about the
Speaker 1: wonderful world of butterflies and migraining animals, send us a email.
Speaker 1: Science Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Yeah or yeah,
Speaker 1: check us out on Facebook where we're stuff in the
Speaker 1: Science Lab, or you can also find us on Twitter
Speaker 1: where we are lab stuff and we love to keep
Speaker 1: that updated with all sorts of cool science stuff. So
Speaker 1: that's all. Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this
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