Pod Insights Short Wave The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies About this episode Monarch butterfly populations have plummeted due to habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change. In early December, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going to decide whether the monarch should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. If that comes to pass, the migratory butterfly would be one of the most widespread species to receive this listing.
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1:50 Emily Kwong? Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with science correspondent Nate Rot.
1:53 Speaker 01 Emily, hello.
1:55 Emily Kwong? Lately, we have been thinking about monarch butterflies. Every year, millions of these orange butterflies venture across North America. There's an eastern monarch population that winters in the mountains of Mexico.
2:10 Emily Kwong? And a Western population that shelters along the Pacific coast of California, where you live, Nate, have you seen any California monarchs this year?
2:19 Speaker 01 One of my dog's favorite parks is right next to these big eucalyptus trees that the monarchs overwinter in. And it's very cute. He's prancing around in the dewy grass in the morning light. But it's also terrifying, right? Because I'm like, dude, do not catch one of those monarch butterflies. And thankfully, he is not.
2:38 Emily Kwong? Every one of those monarch butterflies is becoming increasingly precious for reasons that we are going to be talking about today.
2:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And that's because, as you well know, Emily, monarch populations here on the West Coast and pretty much everywhere in North America have plummeted over the last few decades. And that's because of three big reasons. Habitat loss, the loss of overwintering sites and milkweed habitat, milkweed being the plant that they depend on. The second one is pesticide use. And the third is climate change, warming up the places that monarchs depend on for winter. So in 2022, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which is like the world's clearinghouse for the species at risk of extinction, put monarch butterflies on their so-called red list as threatened.
3:23 Emily Kwong? And I'm realizing how much of a big deal this declaration was. It sparked all kinds of science across North America to save the monarch butterfly.
3:32 Speaker 01 Right, through all of these really creative approaches.
3:35 Emily Kwong? I looked into this a little bit abroad. One of the approaches I came across was planting trees.
3:43 Emily Kwong? Cuauhtémoc Sainz Romero at the University of Michoacan in Mexico led an effort to assist monarch migration by planting over 1,000 oyamel fir trees at higher and colder elevations. His team hopes that those sites could be protected for longer from climate change.
4:00 Speaker 02 Maybe the monarchs can change the migration route a bit to go to the new places.
4:08 Speaker 01 Whoa, so if monarchs can one day discover these new sites, they might have a fighting chance on a warming planet. Similar work has been done in Idaho and British Columbia.
4:17 Emily Kwong? Nate, what else, though, is happening to save the monarchs in the US?
4:21 Speaker 01 There's all sorts of big conservation efforts that are currently ongoing in the US, but there's one big thing that you should really be thinking about with monarchs as we enter the next couple of months.
4:30 Emily Kwong? OK.
4:30 Speaker 01 The monarch butterfly, while it is listed internationally as vulnerable, it is not listed in the US under the Endangered Species Act. Soon, that might change. In early December, the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to make a proposed determination, which is very official language, about whether the monarch butterfly should be listed as threatened or endangered, which is complicated and interesting in like so, so, so many ways.
5:00 Emily Kwong? So today on the show, we look at the decision that's got the butterfly world aflutter.
5:06 Speaker 01 Pun excused. And we look at the challenge of protecting a species that's habitat could be your backyard.
5:14 Emily Kwong? You are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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6:55 Emily Kwong? Okay, so Nate, since you live in California, is your life just one surrounded by monarch butterflies?
7:00 Speaker 01 It kind of depends on the time of year, right? Like, so these are migrating species. So there's times where there's tons of them here in coastal California, and there's times where there's fewer. We are now entering the time of year where there are a lot of them because we're entering winter. I recently took a trip to another park, not the one where my dog chases butterflies, with a couple of biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And I got to learn, like, all sorts of cool things about monarchs. Like, did you know that milkweed, the plant their larvae eat, is toxic?
7:31 Speaker 05 And when the larvae eat the sap, it makes them not taste good.
7:35 Speaker 01 So this is Karen Sinclair, by the way. Whoa, so they're just low-grade poisoning themselves to not taste good?
7:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, and that's the reason why monarch butterflies and their caterpillars are so colorful. They are telling the world and all the predators, "Hey, I don't taste good. If you eat me, you'll feel really sick. So please go away."
7:54 Speaker 01 So I had no idea about this. But the reason that I met with Karen was it like, you know, I didn't want to just pocket a bunch of fun pub trivia facts. I met with her because Karen trains volunteers to count monarch butterflies at overwintering sites in Ventura County every year. And it's those types of counts that are really providing the data to show that monarchs are in trouble.
8:19 Speaker 05 And the number of times I have had the locals walk up to us and they go, "Oh, what are you doing?" I'm like, "Oh, we're counting monarchs. The monarchs are here." I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. I used to see monarchs all the time when I was a kid, you know? You could see them just dripping off the trees, and I didn't think they were here anymore."
8:38 Speaker 01 So scientists think today, we only see about 5% of the number of monarch butterflies that used to be on the west coast. That's how far the western population has dropped. The eastern population of monarchs have dropped by about 80%.
8:53 Emily Kwong? Nate, that honestly surprises me. I didn't realize it had dropped by that much.
8:57 Speaker 01 It's a ton. So that is why there's been this huge push from wildlife groups and insect advocates to try to get the monarch butterfly listed under the Endangered Species Act. And after 10 years of pushing, the Fish and Wildlife Service is now facing a court mandated deadline to make a decision by December 4th.
9:17 Emily Kwong? Okay, so that's like a month away. Do we know what Fish and Wildlife is gonna say?
9:22 Speaker 01 Emily, do we know anything about anything, really?
9:25 Emily Kwong? True, true. Point made.
9:28 Speaker 01 You know, I asked Emma Pelton, an endangered species biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, which is like one of the groups that's been pushing for a listing, that very question. And here was her response.
9:40 Speaker 06 I think, I think I have no idea what's coming. But I am hopeful that, you know, that this could be a really wonderful ruling.
9:51 Emily Kwong? Okay, what would that mean to her, for the monarch butterfly to be listed by Fish and Wildlife?
9:55 Speaker 01 So this is where I think it gets really interesting. Emma wants and thinks the science supports the monarch butterfly being listed as threatened, not endangered.
10:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, I don't think anyone has argued for endangered. I don't think it qualifies. The threats are many, but not, I think, an imminent risk of like extinction right now.
10:13 Speaker 01 And that like distinction between threatened and endangered is really important. Because a species that gets listed as endangered in the US gets all of the protections of the Endangered Species Act. It gets everything it has to offer. Like, you cannot kill monarch butterflies. You cannot mess with them.
10:30 Emily Kwong? But if it's listed as threatened, you can mess with them?
10:34 Speaker 01 So it depends.
10:37 Speaker 01 In some cases, depending on what they rule, you could. I don't want to get too far down the like, technical wonky path of environmental law, because I don't think anyone wants to go down that path. But if a species is listed as threatened, there's more wiggle room. There can be carve outs and protections to accommodate for the people that are going to have to interact with that animal. They could say like, it's not illegal to raise monarchs in captivity, or for somebody to touch one. They could exempt those kinds of activities, and Emma thinks that they honestly should.
11:11 Speaker 06 We really want to see some common sense middle ground about exempting activities that are beneficial. This is a unique animal. It's in classrooms, it's in homes, it's in gardens. This is something used for education and outreach. So we don't want that to, you know, be taken off the plate.
11:26 Emily Kwong? Monarchs are absolutely like beloved by school groups. And I remember gently touching their wings as a kid when they would come to my grandma's butterfly garden. I can see why she'd want there to still be the potential to interact with monarchs.
11:43 Speaker 01 Totally. And presumably, you'd want to give people some more flexibility around them, because, you know, like we've been saying, the monarch's habitat is the better part of the North American continent.
11:53 Emily Kwong? Yeah.
11:53 Speaker 01 So at least for part of the year, right? Like when they're migrating through.
11:56 Emily Kwong? Are there concerns that a threatened status level could offer too much flexibility in a way that would hurt the monarch?
12:03 Speaker 01 So I asked Emma the exact same thing.
12:05 Speaker 06 This is like the really rich vein, this whole decision. I think we are all really interested in awaiting what they're going to say, because I think the devil's going to be in the details.
12:15 Speaker 01 And that's because there are so many variations of what they could decide. And nobody wants to see any of the conservation work that's already going on to be disrupted. So like, right now, there are volunteer networks, insect enthusiasts, conservation groups, states, tribes, agencies, working to help monarchs. Here's Bridget Rollins, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center.
12:37 Emily Kwong? And a huge push for that has been
12:38 Speaker 07 Getting farmers, getting landowners to plant areas of milkweed, to maybe leave some acres unsprayed, to encourage monarch habitat, and to do some citizen conservation work like counting species.
12:48 Speaker 01 And remember, this is a species that migrates through nearly every state in a country where most of the land is privately owned.
12:55 Emily Kwong? So you need buy-in from private landowners in the US if you really want to protect the monarch.
13:00 Speaker 01 Bingo. And Bridget says farmers she's talked to are really concerned that if the monarch butterfly gets listed, it could limit their use of pesticides. Remember, that's one of the biggest drivers of the species and really all insects declines.
13:13 Emily Kwong? Yeah.
13:14 Speaker 01 And it could limit where they plow and plant crops.
13:17 Speaker 07 I think there's a big concern amongst, you know, farmers in particular. You know, we've done all this work. We've been trying to do right by this, but maybe now we're going to be in a position where our good work makes it actually harder for us once the species is listed.
13:34 Emily Kwong? Okay, so that's the kind of many sides of this argument. The ruling is coming up December 4th. It sounds like there's a delicate balance that needs to be struck.
13:43 Speaker 01 But again, you know, it's really important to remind listeners that this is just a proposed ruling, right? So regardless of whether the Fish and Wildlife Service decide to list it as threatened or endangered, or maybe they don't list it at all, there is going to be an opportunity for public comment, for reviews, and most of this, remember, is gonna take place under a new presidential administration.
14:06 Emily Kwong? One, I love that you managed to sneak in some environmental law regardless into this story. Two, I hadn't even thought about that. Right. Okay, what might a second Trump presidency mean for this whole process?
14:21 Speaker 01 So yeah, I asked Bridget that when I talked to her before the election, and she said, what I think everyone would say, which is that we don't really know, like, we don't know what the Trump administration is going to do on so many fronts. But she did say we can look to his first term for clues.
14:37 Speaker 07 They very famously passed a lot of regulations that have now since been overturned, but at the time were considered a pretty monumental, kind of a shift away from how the Endangered Species Act had been implemented.
14:54 Emily Kwong? So I would not be surprised to see that again.
14:58 Speaker 01 And so what she's referring to there are these rules that the Trump administration passed, making easier, you know, for example, to remove a species from the endangered species list, to weaken protections for threatened species, to make it harder to consider climate change when making decisions, and allowing agencies to consider economic losses to an industry like farming or logging when they're trying to decide if a species deserves protection. But one of the things that really stood out to me while I was talking to people about this, regardless of what happens, you know, this is kind of a groundbreaking rulemaking. There's not a lot of species that get proposed for listing that exist in nearly every US state. So Emma says this is kind of like a test.
15:38 Speaker 06 How do we get large-scale landscape conservation moving without creating a lot of regulatory fear?
15:45 Speaker 01 One of the monarch scientists I talked to was a plant and insect ecologist at the University of Nevada Reno. His name is Matt Forrester. And he says we, as a society, really need to figure out how to do this large-scale, large landscape conservation.
16:00 Speaker 06 Especially in the US, we all grew up with the idea that there, you know, there's national parks, right? And like, they've got a fence around them, and that's going to be fine. But nothing's fine now, right? All threats are completely pervasive now. We got to deal with that.
16:12 Emily Kwong? Absolutely. It's a sobering note to end on, but absolutely true. Nate, I am excited to see what the Fish and Wildlife Service decides to do in a month.
16:20 Speaker 01 Me too. I will be reading with great interest and earnest.
16:25 Emily Kwong? Surrounded by the monarch butterflies of California.
16:27 Speaker 01 Yes, of course.
16:30 Emily Kwong? This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director. Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcast strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Peace, and thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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