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BY Hunter Schwarz

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Researchers track animal movements through tags on their limbs, wings, and shells, but how do you track a creature that weighs less than a gram? To build a device tiny and light enough for a monarch butterfly, designers had to make the smallest wildlife tracking device on the planet.

A tiny transmitter for butterflies designed by the New Jersey-based Cellular Tracking Technologies (CTT) is called the BlūMorpho. It’s just three-and-a-half centimeters (1.4 inches) long, weighs about as much as a grain of rice, and works without a battery.

[Image: Courtesy Vermont Center for Ecostudies]

CTT manufactures devices for wildlife telemetry, or tracking the movements and migration patterns of wild animals.…