Hunt for butterfly eggs no flitting passion Work is critical to monarch study

Five o'clock is quitting time at the Massachusetts Audubon Society headquarters, but on Monday afternoons this summer it's when Sandy Cofran is just getting started. She's on the lookout for some of the little things in life.

Weather permitting, Cofran, a receptionist by day, spends an hour or more in a field between a parking lot and Route 117 in Lincoln, inspecting the undersides of the green leaves of milkweed for the elusive eggs of the monarch butterfly.

"It's basically a science dweeb looking for a needle in a haystack," said Cofran, an amateur researcher for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, a national study of what has been called America's favorite insect.

Since 1997, the project (www.mlmp.org) has utilized about 400 volunteers, mostly in the Midwest, to study population densities of the butterfly eggs and larvae so scientists can learn more about them. The allure of the colorful butterfly is one of the reasons for studying it.

"The monarch is an insect that most people recognize and most people love. So, if we want to learn about the ecology of an insect using volunteers, this is the perfect one, because people care," said program director Karen Oberhauser, an assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota.

Cofran, 55, cares more than most. This summer, she's the only researcher in Massachusetts.

Cofran has had a lifelong love affair with nature. Growing up in rural Westford during the 1950s, she said she would often spend hours alone in the woods. This is her second summer combing through milkweed leaves for the monarch.

Part of the attraction for her is that she's contributing to science, she said, but most of it is just being outdoors among the many forms of life. Among other things, she finds it therapeutic. "There's nothing to me that gets rid of your stress better than being outside and getting out of yourself the way you can when you're watching something else."

The research is an exercise in patience.

So far this summer, Cofran has found only one egg, which she describes as a ridged, translucent dome about the size of the head of a pin.

"I was so knocked out, I was leaping around here like a maniac," said Cofran, who made her discovery on July 26. "That's why I do this after work, so nobody sees me like that," said Cofran, who was trained at the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton about two years ago.

To be sure, Oberhauser said, not finding monarchs offers important insights, too: "Because it says something about where they aren't."

The cooperation of trained volunteers, she said, allows scientists to gather much more usable information than previously possible.

"We can't do this research on our own," Oberhauser said, "so people like Sandy and other people all over the country are making an important contribution. We're learning new things because of them."

In broad terms, Oberhauser is studying how monarch butterfly populations are doing -- and the news lately isn't good. Comparing the same sites, this is the third year in a row that monarch population densities are down, a trend she finds disturbing.

While it's too soon to say what accounts for the decline, Oberhauser noted, possible factors include loss of milkweed in farmland, big winter storms in Mexico in 2002 and earlier this year that killed the butterflies in their winter quarters, and pesticides.

Lincoln Brower, a monarch butterfly specialist not involved in the monitoring project, said Oberhauser is doing crucial work.

"Karen's study is really important, because in order to really monitor what is going on in the field requires a lot of manpower -- and committed manpower," said Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia who has studied monarch butterflies since 1955. "Karen is teaching the scientific methods and, if you follow them, you're going to get good scientific data."

The research project received a three-year, $750,000 federal grant in 2002 from the National Science Foundation, which has helped support training of volunteers.

Research begins with finding a patch of milkweed, which is where adult females place their eggs. (In these parts, the egg-laying takes place between late spring and late summer.)

Monarch butterflies have a sort of love-hate-love relationship with milkweed.

Love: It's the only thing monarch caterpillars can eat. Hate: The stickiness of the latex in the milkweed leaf can kill monarch caterpillars by gluing their mouths shut. Love: If a monarch survives to butterflyhood, toxins from the milkweed leaf stay in its body, protecting it from predators such as birds and mice.

But milkweed can be hard to find in this region, which may partly explain why the Northeast has long been a backwater for monarch butterflies, which generally can find better pickings in the Plains states.

Indeed, Cofran's search on a recent Monday turned up only a milkweed longhorn beetle, a milkweed bug, a ladybug, and a green tree frog. That leads to a philosophy reminiscent of an old Grateful Dead song.

"I've gotten to the point where if I don't find exactly what I'm looking for," Cofran said, "I just enjoy what I'm finding."