For his eighth grade project, Ebright tried to find the cause of a viral disease that killed nearly all monarch caterpillars every few years. He thought the disease might be carried by a beetle and so tried to raise caterpillars in the presence of beetles but did not get any real results. The next year his science fair project was testing the theory that viceroy butterflies copy monarchs.

The theory was that viceroys look like monarchs because monarchs don’t taste good to birds. Viceroys, do taste good to birds. So the more they look like monarchs, the less likely they are to become a bird’s dinner. Ebright’s project was to see whether, in fact, birds would eat monarchs. He found that a starling would not eat ordinary bird food. It would eat all the monarchs it could get.

In his second year in high school, Richard Ebright began the research that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. Indirectly, it also led to his new theory on the life of cells. To understand the purpose of the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa he built a device that showed that the spots were producing a hormone necessary for the butterfly’s full development.