Frederick Albert Urquhart

Frederick Albert Urquhart (born December 13, 1911 in Toronto , Ontario , † November 3, 2003 ) was a Canadian zoologist and lepidopterist . He was Professor of Zoology at the University of Toronto from 1963 to 1977 . His decades of research on the monarch butterfly , which he carried out together with his wife, led to the discovery of their wintering quarters in the mountains of Mexico in 1975 .

Live and act

Childhood and youth

Frederick Urquhart grew up in a small wooden house near a railway line. Along this there were large areas of grass and weeds that attracted numerous insects with their flowers in summer. At the age of five he caught a bumblebee with his bare hands and painfully learned how insects defend themselves against their hunters. The insects fascinated him since then and he often roamed the meadows, listening to the hum of the bees and the chirping of the locusts, and watched the butterflies suckle on the flowers. At the age of seven he started collecting and identifying butterflies. At night he looked for moths along the street lights and trees . By the age of 16 he already had a collection that covered almost all of the local insect fauna. He acquired his knowledge of insects from books in a nearby library. Having gained access to books for adults in addition to the youth library, he was fascinated by the origin of species by Charles Darwin and the books by Jean-Henri Fabre on experiments on insects. At that time he wondered where monarch butterflies migrate to in winter.

academic career

In 1931 Urquhart began studying biology at the University of Toronto, which he graduated with excellent results in 1935. A BA Bensley Fellowship enabled him to study entomology, which led to his master's degree in 1937 and his doctorate in 1940. He then went to the Department of Transportation's Meteorological Department and taught meteorology with the Royal Canadian Air Force until the end of World War II .

In 1945 he became director of zoology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and in 1948 he was also assistant professor at the University of Toronto. A year later, he also became director of paleontology at the ROM. In 1961 he got a full position as a lecturer and from 1963 until his retirement in 1977 he was a full professor of zoology at the University of Toronto.

Monarch butterfly research

The book The Migration of Butterflies (1930) by Carrington Bonsor Williams was the starting point of his research. Little was known about migratory insects at the time, particularly the monarch butterfly. All we knew was that the moths migrate south in September and in 1937 he marked the first moths to learn more about their migrations. However, there was no success. He continued researching various marking methods until he finally found a simple and weather-resistant method through a suggestion from a friend. The stickers, about 6 by 12 millimeters in size, called alar tag , from the Latin alar for wings, were a breakthrough for marking butterflies. These were labeled " Send to Zoology University of Toronto Canada ".

In 1945 he married Norah Roden Patterson, with whom he spent a lifetime researching monarch butterflies.

His wife wrote an article about flagged monarch butterflies for a magazine in 1952. This post contained a call for volunteers to help them with their work. 12 people responded and founded the International Migration Association . The Urquharts provided the materials for the labeling and trained the volunteers; twenty years later the association already had over 600 members with thousands of helpers. These marked hundreds of thousands of moths and thus the Urquharts succeeded in gaining new knowledge about them. It turned out that the moths flew up to 130 kilometers in a day, but only in daylight, and that they avoided wind and open water. The direction of flight of the moths was from northeast to southwest and the Urquharts traveled to California and the Gulf of Mexico , but without finding the wintering quarters.

In 1972, Nora wrote to Mexican newspapers and called for cooperation in the search for the butterfly. The American engineer Ken Brugger from Mexico City then drove around Mexico in search of butterflies for the next few years. In 1974 he married Cathy and the two butterfly lovers kept looking. They found dead animals again and again and got closer and closer to the wintering quarters. In 1975 they showed dead animals to loggers, who finally showed them the way to the monarch butterfly quarters in the volcanic mountains, 240 kilometers from Mexico City. Then they called the Urquharts and told them that they had found millions of butterflies. The following year the Urquharts traveled to Mexico themselves and visited the site. The ground was covered with butterflies and the trees were full of them. A branch broke off under their weight, including a moth marked in Minnesota .

Today we know 13 places on five mountains where monarch butterflies hibernate. These have been legally protected since 2000 by the 56,000 hectare Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve , but are threatened by illegal logging. In their home country Canada, the Urquharts campaigned for the preservation of wild silk plants that serve as food for the caterpillars of the moths.

Honors

• On July 7, 1998, Frederick Albert Urquhart and Norah Roden Urquhart were honored with the admission as Members in the Order of Canada for their life's work. This is the third grade of the Canadian state's highest honor for its citizens.
• The Urquharts were honored with the WWH Gunn Award , the highest honor awarded by the Federation of Ontario Naturalists , which was founded by Frederick Urquhart in the 1940s.
• The Urquharts were accepted as Fellows of the Royal Entomological Society of London .
• In Dundas , Ontario, the Urquhart Butterfly Garden honors the merits of the Urquhart.

swell

• University of Toronto: In memoriam: Frederick Urquhart ( Memento of February 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (Accessed February 2, 2008)
• University of Toronto: Order of Canada for Two Zoologists ( Memento December 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (Accessed February 2, 2008)

literature

• Urquhart, Frederick Albert: The Monarch Butterfly . University of Toronto Press, 1960 (361 pages).
• Urquhart, Frederick Albert: The Monarch Butterfly: International Traveler . Nelson Hall Publishers, 1987, ISBN 978-0-8304-1039-2 (232 pages).
• Urquhart, Frederick Albert: A discussion of Batesian mimicry: As applied to the monarch and viceroy butterflies . Ed .: Division of Zoology and Palaeontology, Royal Ontario Museum. University of Toronto Press, 1957 (27 pages).