The Blu+ Morpho transmitter is a technological marvel. It weighs just 60 milligrams. That is a tad more than two grains of rice. It has done away with the historical use of battery technology that makes tracking transmitters so heavy and replaced it with a tiny solar panel. The entire unit is so small, it can fit comfortably on the back of the monarch’s thorax with eyelash glue. An antenna extends along the body of the monarch to the rear. As long as the sun is out and hitting the solar panel, the transmitter will transmit its position and other spatial and temporal data every 1-5 seconds on the same frequency range as the Bluetooth resident in most mobile smartphones today.

Tremendous synergy happens when this remarkable technology is aligned with Bluetooth transmission frequencies. Suddenly, millions of mobile smartphones with Bluetooth technology are now active receivers for the Blu+ transmitter. Through this “crowd source” application, any phone enabled with “location services” or “Bluetooth” will pick up the Blu+ transmission data transmission and redirect it to the central processor for capture of the data. The owner of the phone is never interfered with and no personal data of the phone’s owner is never transmitted.

What makes this marriage of technology particularly exciting is the development of a free app (Project Monarch app, download here), that creates a “picture window” into the world of E-tagged monarchs. With the app, each individual monarch can be tracked. If you have adopted your own monarch, just type the name of your monarch into the app and your specific monarch will be displayed with all its specific detail. Want to see what is happening among the monarchs that have reached Mexico? You can. How about being curious of the overwintering activity along the coast of California? No problem, check them all out. Bottom line: The world of monarch tracking will never be the same!