Editor’s Choice: One of Citizen Science’s most iconic projects, the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, yields another excellent research result and a great lesson for all citizen science projects. By better understanding how certain species of flies impact monarch butterfly populations, researchers can better pinpoint which are human-based factors in monarch decline. — LFF —
Excerpt: Thanks to citizen volunteers, scientists now know more than ever about the flies that attack monarch butterfly caterpillars. Since 1999, volunteers participating in the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project have collected and raised more than 20,000 monarch eggs and caterpillars, and they’ve recorded incidents of those specimens being parasitized by fly larvae. They have also collected more than 1,100 specimens of those flies and sent them to entomologists at the University of Minnesota for identification. Findings from this long-running collaboration are published today in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
Source: Entomology Today, 2017. Citizen Science Delivers “Unprecedented View” of Monarch Butterfly Parasitoids. Posted 10 July 2017. Available at: https://entomologytoday.org/2017/07/10/citizen-science-delivers-unprecedented-view-of-monarch-butterfly-parasitoids/. [Last accessed 31 July 2017].