Butterflies in Flight

I just had the opportunity to watch the IMAX film Flight of the Butterflies.  It was a staff preview and it may be shown in the future at the Museum Center.  It was a most interesting film.  I enjoyed how it incorporated elements of the monarch migration that are known today with the story of the discovery of that route by Fred Urquhart.

It’s a natural history epic. It’s a compelling detective story. It’s a scientific adventure at its best. It took Dr. Fred Urquhart almost 40 years to discover the monarch butterflies’ secret hideaway and prove the most incredible migration on Earth. Following the year-long annual migration cycle of the butterflies, the award-winning production team filmed hundreds of millions of monarchs in their remote overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico in 2011 and again in 2012 and also along their migratory routes from Canada, across the U.S. and into Mexico. The technology of IMAX® immerses you in the astounding migration experience as two generations of the butterflies migrate north and then a Super Generation miraculously finds its way from Canada to a few isolated mountaintops in Mexico – to a place it has never been!
--from Flight of the Butterflies website, What is Flight of the Butterflies in 3D?

Female Monarch butterfly

If you enjoy nature documentaries then you should definitely watch this movie when it is available in a theater near you.  It was also fascinating to see how long it took for the whole story to unravel for the Urquharts as they studied Monarch butterflies for decades.  You'll also enjoy quite a few neat visual shots, especially those of Monarch swarms in Mexico.  The advertisements for the film indicate it is to be released in 3D, but the Omnimax Theater at the Museum Center doesn't utilize this component as far as I know.  It was still good, though I thought I could detect several shots that were designed for 3D.

It also brought to mind an article that I read on the BBC recently and brought to mind the different technology that is available to today's researchers.  The article involves a butterfly, the Painted Lady, found in the British Isles that just like Monarchs in North America seemed to "disappear" each year.

The mystery of an annual disappearance of a UK butterfly has been solved, scientists say after tracking the painted lady's migration on radar. 

They found that the butterflies do not die in this country at the end of summer, as some believed, but make a high altitude escape south - one leg of a 9,000-mile migration. 

The team analysed 60,000 sightings from British observers for the study. 

The discoveries are "astonishing", says Richard Fox, a co-author on the paper. 

The findings are based on data from 2009 and published in the journal Ecography.
--from BBC website, Radar helps solve painted lady migration mystery

The researchers involved in the project discovered that the butterflies were migrating southward, but at much higher elevations than had been previously suspected.  They were out of sight of ground-based observers as they flew at elevations up to a kilometer high (though they adjust altitude to find favorable winds).

The project combined the citizen science of "thousands and thousands" of eyes on the ground, from the "fringes of the Arctic circle" to sub-Saharan Africa, with high altitude insect-monitoring radar. It was these two working together that enabled the team to make the breakthrough, said Mr Fox. 

The radar element of the study was led in the UK by Rothamsted Research. It showed that the butterflies flew at an average height of over 500 metres on their way south, reaching speeds of up to 30 miles per hour (48km/h) in favourable winds.

It found that it could take up to six successive generations for the species to complete a 9,000-mile (14,400km) round trip from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle. 

The journey is much longer than that undertaken by the famous Monarch butterfly, which migrates between Mexico and Canada.

--from BBC website, Radar helps solve painted lady migration mystery

I thought that the timing of the two stories was  interesting.  And now that I think about it I do remember raising some Monarch butterflies when I was a child in California.