U-M biologist D. André Green holds a monarch butterfly in an outdoor insectary at the university’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Green studies monarch migration and the internal timer that tells the butterflies it’s time to wake from winter dormancy and prepare for their springtime journey northward. Image credit: Daryl Marshke, Michigan Photography

The fact that millions of North American monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles each fall and somehow manage to find the same overwintering sites in central Mexican forests and along the California coast, year after year, is pretty mind-blowing.

Once they get there, monarchs spend several months in diapause, a hormonally controlled state of dormancy that aids winter survival. Though diapause is not as obviously impressive as the celebrated annual migrations, it holds mysteries that have perplexed scientists who study biological timing.

Weeks before warming temperatures and longer days signal to the monarchs that it’s time to mate and begin spring’s northward migration, an internal timer goes off like an alarm clock to rouse the insects, telling them it’s time to end diapause and prepare for the critical upcoming events.

Studies in other organisms have shown that cold temperatures can influence the diapause-termination timer, and University of Michigan biologist D. André Green suspected the same is true for monarchs. His study at monarch overwintering sites in central California confirmed it, and his gene expression analyses help explain how cold temperature speeds up that internal timer.

“These results are particularly interesting because they address a counterintuitive result: How does cold temperature, which normally slows down an organism’s metabolism and development, speed up diapause? This work is one of the first to provide insights into this question,” said Green, a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who began the work while at the University of Chicago.

The findings have important implications for North America’s monarchs—whose populations have declined steadily for decades at the overwintering sites—as the climate changes, Green and co-author Marcus Kronforst of the University of Chicago wrote in a Molecular Ecology study published July 24, 2019.

Understanding how diapause dynamics are affected by environmental and anthropogenic factors at their overwintering sites may be critical for understanding North American monarch population decline and guiding future conservation efforts, a point highlighted by the record low number of monarchs recorded in the western North American monarch population in 2018,” Green and Kronforst wrote.

The findings also suggest that monarchs will act as an important sentinel species for monitoring environmental change and disturbance at overwintering sites. If diapause ends too early, monarchs may lose some of the protective time the dormancy period provides.

Read full Michigan News press release

The story is receiving widespread media attention, including this article in Popular Science.