Word: urquhart
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...appear to fly south in fall like migratory birds. Many authorities have doubted that insects have the brains and endurance to make a real migration to avoid the northern winter. The strategy of most insects is to sit out the winter as eggs or pupae. Last week Dr. Frederick Urquhart, director of Toronto's zoology museum, told about a 19-year study that tends to prove that Monarchs do migrate...
...Urquhart, then a young zoologist on the museum's staff, began trying to label Monarch butterflies to find out how far they fly. He soon ran into tagging trouble. A label that sticks firmly to a Monarch's wing is apt to make it aerodynamically unstable...
Insect Aerodynamics. During World War II, Dr. Urquhart worked for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and familiarity with airplanes gave him new ideas. He figured that small paper labels attached to the leading edges of the butterflies' wings close to the body instead of on the surfaces would not interfere as much with their flyability. Little by little Dr. Urquhart learned to make the labels stick by cutting small holes in the wing, folding the label over the hole and gluing the paper to itself rather than to the almost adhesive-proof wing. In 1950 and 1951 he tagged...
...large-scale help was on the way. After Dr. Urquhart's wife wrote a nontechnical article in the American Museum of Natural History's magazine Natural History, eager volunteers came forward, and butterfly-tagging started on a continent-wide scale. Again, failure. It soon became apparent that the labels were not sticking in wet weather...
HAROLD W. URQUHART EDITOR...