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Every spring, 100-200 million Monarch butterflies begin their epic migration from Mexico, flying northwards to the United States and Canada, before returning again to Mexico for the winter. With a total distance of around 5, 000 miles, the Monarch butterfly is the only type of insect that does anything like this. Their feat of endurance and navigation points to the power of our Creator God. But the most amazing thing about this journey is that the butterflies that return home for the winter are not the same ones that left Mexico in the spring. The total migration is like a relay, where several generations of butterflies complete their part of the trip in their short lifetime. The butterflies that return south to Mexico for the winter are at least the great-great-grandchildren of those that set off back in the spring. This means that the navigation information they need to complete their part of the larger journey is already programmed into their DNA. Each new generation needs to know instinctively how to continue the migration.
So how does each new generation of butterflies know in which direction to fly? Monarchs use a ‘sun compass’ to read the horizontal position of the sun, while linking this to the biological time clock built into their antennae. This means they can keep flying in the right direction, even as the position of the sun changes throughout the day. When the sky is too cloudy for the sun compass to work, they have a magnetic compass as a back-up. Somehow, the final generation of butterflies that complete the return journey have their compasses flipped, so that they instinctively fly in the opposite direction, back down to Mexico.
While it takes several generations to complete the journey north, a single ‘super generation’ of butterflies will do the whole return journey in one go. They developed from a special generation of eggs and have become very different from their parents. Their bodies make less of one special hormone chemical, which basically stops them ageing, and so they can fly all the way back to Mexico, often to the same tree that their great-great-grandparents left from! I hope you agree with me that this multi-generational migration, with amazing navigation skill, is too complex to happen by chance, but instead shows purposeful design. Our God has programmed this behaviour into the delicate Monarch butterfly. He alone deserves our recognition and our praise.
Unraveling the Great Butterfly Migration Mystery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBakLuH6kDY. Accessed 22/05/2024
Eric Cassell, Animal Algorithms, Discovery Institute, 2021.
