Monarch Butterflies Get Tiny Radio Trackers | Expedition Raw

[Music] He's like a little kid. It's wonderful. We're trying to put the first electronic tag on a free flying migrating monarch butterfly. If that works, then we could for the first time really follow them in the wild, how they migrate, and find out exactly how they do it.

Let's start with liftoff here. The bag is made out of a small battery, like a hearing battery, a little circuit, and it just beeps. We receive this over the radio in an antenna, and that allows us to follow the animal. Look at that! Wow! Off they go! They only have a few habitat places; if those areas are destroyed, then there's no monarch butterflies [Music] anymore.

Big Boy! Wow, that's a big one! The biggest butterfly we've got. There it goes! It's successful! If the animal doesn't seem to be affected by the tag, so they move around normally, they just do their regular thing, and you can follow them.

Mar, do you hear anything? Nope! Go a little lower and search closer to the ground. All right, once we locate them from the air, we come back. We want to find them again; we want to see what they're doing.

Hey, here he is! That's him! Yes, fantastic! Good for you! Big boy's ready to go. Go to Wisconsin, find a girlfriend! There he goes! Yeah, not right! Look at! He's going Northeast! You headed out that way, right along the tree line?

Northeast! I built this thing from scratch to get aerial shots for conservation research. Go!