Victoria M. Pocius, Ph.D

I always enjoyed being outside and catching salamanders and insects growing up in Pennsylvania. I had no idea that it would become a large part of my career. 

  After a class project in environmental biology, I became interested in the non-target effects of pesticides and herbicides. As an undergraduate at Lafayette College, I investigated the effect of atrazine exposure on monarch butterfly development. After this experience, I knew that I wanted to continue to do research.

   After graduation, I worked as a seasonal monarch biologist with the Monarch Monitoring Project in Cape May, NJ. By assisting with daily monarch surveys, I added to a long term data set spanning over two decades.  From Cape May, I moved to Virginia to work with Dr. Lincoln Brower on a study of comparative monarch lipid storage in drought and normal precipitation years (Brower et al. 2015).  We discovered that migrating monarchs that reached the overwintering colonies had normal lipid stores, instead of the depleted stores that we expected.  After these experiences, I had more questions about monarch biology especially related to habitat restoration and conservation.

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   To further my research and outreach skills, I accepted a position at the University of Kansas to complete a Masters degree with Dr. Chip Taylor.  Through my position as Monarch Watch's milkweed coordinator, I learned about coordinating the growth and transport of different milkweed species while completing research examining monarch ovarian development under different temperatures.  After seeing so many different milkweed species grown in the greenhouse, I wondered if monarchs preferred some species to others, especially as habitat restoration became crucial to boost monarch numbers in the Midwest.

  This question of preference lead to my dissertation research with Dr. John Pleasants and Dr. Diane Debinski. While at Iowa State, we found that monarch larvae will eat many milkweed species readily (Pocius 2017a), but that there are differences in the adults that fed on A. sullivantii and A. hirtella (Pocius et al. 2017b).  Female monarchs also exhibit oviposition preference for A. incarnata and A. syriaca when given a choice among 8 native milkweeds (Pocius et al. 2018a, 2018b).  This information provides additional evidence for including a variety of milkweeds in restorations.

  I just finished a postdoc at Penn State where I investigated  the effect of host plant on adult monarch metabolism and I have just started a second postdoc at the University of Alabama in the Kersch-Becker Lab!

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