Learning about the monarch butterly

In the eight years since the Educational Information and Resource Center has been hosting local workshops teaching the unusual life cycle of the monarch butterfly, teachers across the country have adopted the interactive teaching tool in their elementary school classrooms. This summer, the EIRC‘s Monarch Teacher Network has expanded to include teachers from as far afield as Peru and New Zealand and continues to add workshops in new locations. At a workshop held at Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg this week, teachers learned how to find monarch caterpillars, build rearing cages, tag the butterflies and release them. Tagged monarchs are tracked and recorded in a database maintained by researchers Monarch Watch (www.monarchwatch.org), which is run out of the University of Kansas. (Video by Nyier Abdou /The Star-Ledger)