Solar-powered Bluetooth tags track monarchs across 1,800 km
Radio-tagged Monarch butterflies
Canadian Wildlife Federation researchers, working with Environment and Climate Change Canada and the University of Ottawa, fitted monarchs on Manitoulin Island and in Prince Edward County with BluMorpho tags — tiny solar panels and antennas that ping nearby cellphones over Bluetooth. One male covered 1,801 km in 27 days, crossing two Great Lakes and eight U.S. states; a female flew 1,569 km in 11 days. It's a pilot study, and gaps in detections can mean predation, a lost tag, or simply no phones nearby.
It's also possible that the tag could have fallen off, or that the Monarch is flying through rural areas where there are no phones to pick up the signal, or it's too cloudy and rainy for the Monarch to open its wings for travel.
- dj_gitmo
It’s amazing that they can cross Lake Michigan without stopping. It looks like 60-70 miles. What a cool project.
- rdmuser
A lot comes up when you search for the BluMorpho tags. Some random links:
https://celltracktech.com/pages/blumorpho
https://monarchresearch.org/news-and-events/monarch-research...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/track-monarch-b...
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/09/21/pacific-northwest-mon...
A little pdf guide: https://westernmonarchcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/M...
Looks like there is an app you can download too that can do stuff like scanning for tags nearby.
- lovich
The site looks like it got hugged to death.
I’m on the monarch migration path and had wild milkweeds with monarch butterflies for a few years but the last 2-3 years oleander aphids exploded in population and I’ve seen a single caterpillar since.
Are there ways to mitigate that while not killing the monarchs or am I just shit out of luck?