ALL Butterflies are free, free to come and go, says the song lyric.
Nothing, apparently, about monarch butterflies. Every fall, monarchs flutter, flap and mostly glide thousands of miles from as far north as Canada to a dozen roost sites in central Mexico. The path they follow isn't freely chosen, according to University of Kansas research recently published in the magazine Nature. Rather, they navigate their way southwest by use of a sun compass and an inner clock, says KU entomology professor Orley R. Taylor Jr. Taylor and a former KU postdoctoral fellow, Sandra Perez, found this out by messing up the inner clocks of a group of monarchs and getting them to fly in the wrong direction. The experiment happened last September.