If Jenn Wiley’s path in life shifted in Mexico’s Cerro Pelon mountains last January, it wasn’t because of the monarch butterflies. Millions of the insects blanketed the trees like orange and black snow.

It wasn’t seeing them stream en masse in opposing directions across a clearing, as if traveling on a double-decker super highway — a rare and astonishing event.
Jenn Wiley ’06 is surrounded by swarming monarchs at the Pelon butterfly colony in Mexico. More photosIt wasn’t the whispery noise all those wings bumping into one another makes.

What grabbed the star goalie of Sweet Briar’s field hockey team about field research was “playing with slingshots and hiking around.” Wiley said the physical demands reminded her of the “pure rush of getting hit and getting back up” of competitive sports.

Whether playing defense in lacrosse or shattering the NCAA Division III all-time career saves record in field hockey, the 5-foot-1 Wiley is not afraid of giving or receiving pain to go after the ball.

She once watched a field hockey ball carom 20 feet off her knee, made sure it was out of bounds before collapsing in pain, and then returned to defend the goal. “Like everyone else would, you play the rest of the game out. You’re an athlete,” she said.

For a week between semesters, Wiley accompanied SBC biology professors Linda Fink and Lincoln Brower to a place in the mountains straddling the states of Mexico and Michoacan in the country of Mexico. There, amassed in scattered colonies, 60 to 300 million butterflies cram into a total area of about 15 acres for the winter. They migrate from breeding grounds across the entire eastern United States and southern Canada.

Why the insects pick these and only these mountain spots was the subject of the trip and more than 40 years of research that have made Brower the world’s leading expert on monarchs.

Having left from her near-sea level home in Williamsburg, Wiley labored to hike at 11,000 feet, shivered in below-freezing night air and strained to pull back the thick rubber hose on a 6-foot slingshot using just two fingers of each hand. And relished every minute.

“That stuff opened more ideas – that maybe instead of being in a lab all day it would be better for me to be running around catching butterflies, or something else,” said Wiley, who graduates this spring. Since her sophomore year, she’s chosen classes for a bachelor of science in biology with an eye toward a future in nutrition research.

The slingshot fired a string over tree limbs as high at 80 feet to hang devices that record air temperatures at various heights. The data offer one clue to why monarchs winter only in those few acres and – because they are so selective – how to conserve the habitat to ensure the butterflies’ survival.

Wiley also collected live butterflies for her senior research project, which is a continuation of last fall’s independent study. The science question she’s trying to answer came to her during a summer research project under Brower and Fink’s National Science Foundation grant to study monarchs.

She asked what happens to the insects’ flight muscles during the winter when they spend most of their time hanging motionless in the trees, versus summer and fall when they constantly fly, feed and breed. To find out, she’s comparing the muscle mass of specimens obtained at different times of the year.

“What I loved about the question was that it came so clearly out of Jenn connecting her own interest in athletics and the human body and nutrition and the biology that we’re interested in,” Fink, her advisor, said.

Wiley admits she soaks up all the latest nutrition news, an interest that’s fueled by her passion for sports. She isn’t quite ready to commit to a career in nutrition, though. Graduate school will stay on the backburner while she coaches lacrosse and field hockey at the Merestead camp this summer.

A self-described sports-first scholar who didn’t get serious about grades until her sophomore year, Wiley said her coaches pushed her academically. “I love competition and everything about it. I guess it comes more natural than academics. They’ve kept me on track.”

Her coaches also encouraged her to take leadership roles. “Sophomore year I went to the NCAA Student Athlete Leadership Conference. I’m thinking, ‘What’re y’all doing, I’m not involved.’ I played field hockey and lacrosse, but I wasn’t involved in the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, which I’m president of now,” Wiley said. “It kind of got thrown at me and I loved it.”

The research pull was more subtle. Fink and Brower have “given me more opportunities that are harder to say ‘no’ to. That I can’t say ‘no’ to,” Wiley said.

Her motivation and leadership in the lab and field impressed her mentors, who hope that the lessons Wiley has learned go beyond books and methodologies.

“She’s been interacting with two eccentric people who are spending their lives doing strange and interesting things,” Fink said. “[Lincoln and I] obviously are enthusiastic about [monarch research], so maybe as she figures out what she wants to do with life, she’ll say ‘I can do something because I find it really interesting.’ ”

“Another aspect of this is that Jenn is doing high-quality research that is externally recognized as part of an important program,” Fink added. “What she is doing doesn’t just matter to Jenn. She is making contributions to science.”

Wiley the athlete also contributed to the record books, setting a new Old Dominion Athletic Conference and NCAA Division III mark with 1,042 career saves, earning the 2005 ODAC Player of the Year honors and first-team all-state selections four years running.

Accolades are nice, but she is most proud of taking “full advantage of Division III athletics for everything it’s worth. Being able to play two sports at once, to play every single game I could,” she said.

Her words suggest she hasn’t gotten sports out of her system and Brower, for one, thinks that’s OK. “I don’t think she ever will,” he said. “I laud people who can balance things and do really intensely more than one thing at a time.”

– By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer




Jenn Wiley ’06 is surrounded by swarming monarchs at the Pelon colony in Mexico. On warm days the butterflies leave the trees in search of water. On this day, the butterflies flew in opposing directions in two distinct streams — a phenomenon researcher Lincoln Brower had never seen in more than 40 years of studying monarchs.

Lincoln Brower steadies a 6-foot slingshot while Wiley stretches the thick rubber hoses into firing position. The objective is to shoot a line over a tree limb from which a temperature measuring device can be suspended.

Wiley and Linda Fink record temperature data.

Fink, Wiley and their Mexican assistants collect live monarchs for research experimentation.