Guerra studied a variety of insects prior to taking on butterflies. He has been studying monarchs for more than five years.

“I was interested in dispersal, how insects disperse from certain areas and what they’re looking for,” he said. “But migration always interested me. This movement is more directed — they’re going to a place and back.”

Guerra and his students are trying to determine what effect, if any, increasing urbanization has on the butterfly’s circadian rhythms and knack for navigation.

Students Alexis Moore and Jered Nathan captured monarchs at UC’s Center for Field Studies next to Miami Whitewater Forest in southwest Ohio. Butterflies were placed in mesh enclosures at nine places around the Tristate: three rural, three suburban and three urban. There the butterflies are subjected to the ambient light and noise of city life or the darkness and tranquility of rural living.

One site is a flower garden a few blocks from UC at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Guerra’s students keep the monarchs in a three-foot-tall mesh box on a mulch bed next to the landscaping. Despite the busy city traffic just beyond the zoo security fence, monarchs and other butterflies flitted from flower to flower around the garden.

“Volunteers have adopted this garden. We have pollinator-friendly plants everywhere,” said Lyn Lutz, an exhibit manager at the zoo.

The zoo has exhibits on native plants throughout its 69 acres to encourage and inspire people to plant their own butterfly gardens, she said.

“Everyone should do their part,” she said. “You don’t need a big botanical garden. Anyone can do it.”

On a daily visit, students carefully removed a monarch from the enclosure. Each butterfly has its own identification number written in marker on a wing.

“We name them when he’s not looking,” Moore joked of her professor.

The students feed their test subjects a honey solution each day while the butterflies get used to their new surroundings.

After a few weeks, the monarchs will be released on a still afternoon at the UC field station to see how they orient themselves and whether researchers can discern any difference in flight trajectory among the city, suburban or urban groups, Guerra said.

“At this time of year, fall monarchs should always have the drive to fly south,” he said. “But if you live in the city, if your circadian clock is so disrupted that you can’t use [it] to keep track of the time of day, you might use the sun incorrectly. That’s our hypothesis. We’re predicting urbanization or its effects might affect their behavior.”

Light pollution interferes with wildlife in lots of ways. Turtle hatchlings on coastal beaches can mistake streetlights for the moon and scurry into traffic. Bright lights have been known to disorient migrating birds so badly that they fly into buildings.

And when navigating such great distances, a couple degrees of navigation error could send the monarchs hundreds of miles off course.

If the study determines that city monarchs are prone to disorientation, the next step will be to determine what it is about outdoor lights that disrupts their uncanny navigation system.

“Is it the intensity of the light or is it LED versus incandescent or fluorescents?” Guerra said. “It could be that certain wavelengths of light matter. For example, a lot of moths and night insects use the moon to navigate at night.”

At the field station, researchers also harness butterflies and test them in a flight simulator, sort of a butterfly treadmill. Although flying in place, the butterflies can orient themselves 360 degrees. In flight-simulator trials, monarchs can be tested under various outdoor or indoor testing conditions, during which their flight behavior can be monitored and analyzed. The path of flight directionality they choose in the simulator trials helps researchers learn more about how butterflies orient themselves.

The undergraduate students are enthusiastic about doing fieldwork. Nathan, 22, of Medford, Oregon, said he plans to apply to graduate school at UC to continue his biology research.

“When I tell my family, particularly my dad, about the research — I’m working with butterflies — it’s easier to relate to than a chemical equation or a math formula,” Nathan said.

Student Moore, 21, of Columbus, Ohio, is studying biomedical engineering. Her specialty is biomimicry or how engineers and designers can take natural cues molded by evolution to design better products. For example, the air intakes of fighter plane engines are shaped like the nares (or nostrils) of peregrine falcons, which can breathe even when stooping on prey at 200 mph.

“These creatures have had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and find solutions to problems,” she said. “We can take those solutions and apply them to what we want to do.”

Growing up, Moore said her parents used to scold her never to touch a butterfly.

“They used to say butterflies had a special flying dust. If you touched them, they couldn’t fly anymore,” she said.

But in doing the research, she learned that monarchs are surprisingly hardy. Researchers gently handle them to move or feed them.

“The biggest surprise for me was just how big monarchs get. I’ve been dealing with the smaller summer monarchs in the lab,” Nathan said. “The migrating monarchs are much, much bigger.”

Guerra plans to conduct the monarch study over several years to validate their findings.

“I’m trying to understand how their brains work. What’s amazing is they have a brain the size of a pinhead, and they’re doing something that would take us all sorts of complex computations to do,” he said. “Monarchs are a cool model system.”