About Us
Karen Oberhauser
Karen has been studying monarch butterflies since 1984, and is the director of Monarchs in the Classroom and the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. She is on the faculty of the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota.
She works with teachers and pre-college students in Minnesota and throughout the United States using monarchs to teach about biology, conservation, and the process of science. Karen and her graduate and undergraduate students have studied monarch reproduction, disease dynamics, overwintering biology, larval nutritional requirements, and larval ecology. Some of their more applied work has included a risk assessment of the potential impacts of genetically modified corn on monarchs, and impacts of common garden insecticides. Karen is excited by the way in which the MLMP blends monarch conservation, education and research; and is happy to have made the acquaintance of such a wonderful group of volunteers throughout the US.
Karen lives in Roseville, Minnesota with her husband, ecologist Don Alstad, daughters Amy and Leah Alstad, and two cats. She reads murder mysteries and runs in her spare time, enjoys an 80-acre farm in western Wisconsin that serves as a research site and respite from city life, and is truly fascinated by monarch biology. She is pleased that her parents, Pete and Sanny Oberhauser of Caroline Wisconsin, are part of the cadre of MLMP volunteers.
Reba Batalden
Reba Batalden is a PhD student with the monarch lab. Her research focuses on the effect that climate change could have on monarchs'
summer and migratory habitat. This project relies heavily on data collected by MLMP volunteers. Reba also participates in the MLMP as she monitors three sites in Minnesota and one in Wisconsin with the lab group. She is active in the Monarchs in the Classroom program as well, helping to teach teachers about insect ecology and give them tools to use in their schools. Reba joined the monarch lab in the summer of 2003, after completing her undergraduate degree at St. Olaf College.
Dina Kountoupes
Dina graduated from Macalester College in 1993 with a degree in International Studies and Spanish. She also studied environmental issues and followed that interest immediately after college to work in environmental education centers around the nation: in California, Maine, Vermont, and Minnesota. In 1996 she took her interest in the environment to the tropics of Costa Rica where she applied her Spanish skills to work at sustainable development research centers, sustainable farms, environmental education centers and a sea turtle research center. In 2000 she returned to Minnesota and began working in children’s gardens programs while pursuing a Master's Degree at the University of Minnesota in environmental education, under the advisement of Dr. Karen Oberhauser. Her thesis project evaluated the MLMP program to learn more about how it could better serve a youth audience. Dina continues to work in the monarch lab at the University of MN, helping coordinate both the MLMP program as well as the Schoolyard Ecology Exploration (SEE) program.
Alma De Anda
Alma P. De Anda received her B.S in zoology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 2005. Through various undergraduate research programs such as the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program (California) and Life Science Summer Undergraduate Research Program (Minnesota), she became interested in plant-insect interactions and predator-prey dynamics. While a member of the LSSURP program in Minnesota, she worked with Karen Oberhauser and is now in graduate school in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program under Karen Oberhauser's advisement. Currently Alma is working on predator-prey dynamics using monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) as a model system.
"While researchers have studied how host plant defenses and temperature affect larval survival, there are few comprehensive studies of predators, and no studies of the relative importance of predators, host plant defenses and abiotic factors. I propose to identify predators across a wide range of monarch habitat to shed new light on the selective pressures exerted on the immature stages of monarchs by predators and to determine the life stage (egg or larval instar) at which predation is most important to this organism. In addition, I will study the relative importance of interactions with host plants and predators in regulating monarch population densities (other work in my lab is addressing abiotic factors). My work--involving observational field studies, empirical work, a cooperative network of volunteer citizen scientists, and modeling--will provide the first comprehensive study of monarch population regulation during the breeding portion of their annual migratory cycle."