Radiolab - Of Bombs and Butterflies

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Ecologist Nick Haddad was sitting in his new office at North Carolina State University when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was... The U.S. Army. The Army folks told him, “Look, there��s this endangered butterfly on our base at Fort Bragg, and it’s the only place in the world that it exists. But it’s about to go extinct. And we need your help to save it.” Nick had never even heard of the butterfly. In fact, he barely knew much about butterflies in general. Nonetheless, he said yes to Uncle Sam. “How hard could it be?” he wondered. Turns out, pretty hard. He'd have to trick beavers, dodge bombs, and rethink the fundamental nature of life and death in order to rescue this butterfly before it disappeared forever. **CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Army moved a beaver; in truth, they killed it.  We also overstated the current tally of St Francis Satyrs off range; they are around 200, not 800. The audio has been adjusted to reflect these changes.**This episode was reported by Latif Nasser, and produced by Rachael Cusick. Original music by Jeremy Bloom. Mixing by Arianne Wack. Special thanks to: Snooki Puli, Cita Escalano, Jeffrey Glassberg, Margot Williams, Mark Romyn, Elizabeth Long, Laura Verhegge, the Public Affairs and Endangered Species Branches at Fort Bragg. Want to learn more? you can ...... read Nick Haddad’s book The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature... take a peek at Thomas Kral’s original 1989 paper about the Saint Francis Satyr... visit Fort Bragg's webpage about the Saint Francis Satyr  Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.    

Wait, you're listening. I'm listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. I'll start. No, no, I think you should start because this is your story. Okay, I'm Latif. I'm Chad. this is your story. Okay, I'm Lothiff. I'm Chad.

This is Radio Lab and today, the weeping we're going on story a long time and it feels kind of disproportional because it's a big story about a little thing. Yeah. I'm going to pretend I don't know the little thing of what you speak. What is the story that you're at to tell me and about what? This story is about a tiny fragile critter doing its best to survive in a hostile world. And whether we should help it or let it die. Damn, okay. Okay, so let us begin with... Okay, numbers are running at the bottom, so So now I just use this like a phone Nick had that so maybe let's just start with a phone call I think right yeah start from the beginning early 2000s. Nick is sitting in his office North Carolina State University

This was actually his first job as a professor. Yeah, I was a professor in Zoology still pretty new young guy and one day he's sitting in his new office when the phone rings. And on the other end of the line is someone from Fort Bragg, the US Army base. He was like, why the hell is the army calling me? Yeah, when I got a call from the army, I for sure furled my brow. The first thing the army guy says is, look, there's this endangered butterfly on our base. The things on the precipice of extinction.

And we need your help to save it. Why would the army care about this one butterfly? Well, because this butterfly, you can't find it anywhere else. Fort Bragg is its only known habitat on planet Earth. Since it's listed as endangered, the military has to save it. Like, that's the law. That's the Endager's piece. He's like, which is why they're calling someone like Nick Hadad to try to help

them save it. Now, Nick, he's an ecologist, he's a conservationist, but I'm not an entomologist. I don't know much about other insect species. Technically, he's not even a butterfly guy. Had you heard of that butterfly before? I'd never heard of the butterfly before. At the time, I probably could have named one rare butterfly Everything else was you know just common. So he looks this thing up, you know, just to see what he's working with and The name of this butterfly is the Saint Francis Seder. Is that a D say there? S-A-T-Y-R Sator. Oh, I sounds like a mythological, like a future with a half a horse and a gargoyle or something. Okay, I suppose to like a Passover dinner.

Okay, so it was first discovered and identified in 1983. At the time, it was estimated there were less than 100 butterflies left. Wow. And- Does butterfly have a feature that just played right into my hands? They're like perfectly timed to an academic year. He was like, you know what? After I'm done teaching for the year, I'll just drive down there a few days in the summer.

Maybe it'll take a summer to, sounds like a fun little puzzle. So what was a no-brainer for me? No big deal. He says yes. I was confident that, yeah, it was going to be the person to set it on the right path. I mean, there was no question to me that I was the person who could oversee its recovery. I will say there I'm a naive optimist. Naive because it's almost 20 years later.

He is still trying to save this little flappy creature. He often loses sleep over it. And even though this little butterfly is about the size of a quarter, this thing has entirely upturned his idea of life and death and creation and destruction. Okay. 2002, Nick goes to Fort Bragg.

To start off, he just needs to figure out like how many of these same Francis Sater butterflies are there on Fort Bragg. So he and his students, they basically like trace along 40 miles of creeks and streams. And the first year we determined the population size to be about 1,000 butterflies outside the artillery ranges. Wow.

He's like, huh, oh wow. This is like actually not as bad as I thought. What thousand? I don't know. Does that seem like a lot or a few? Pretty good. Well, it turns out it's just almost nothing. I mean, if you rounded up a thousand butterflies and could just hold them in your hands, you

could smash them down to the size of, I don't know, a softball or something. So not great. But he's like, that's still more butterflies than the hundred that that original paper said that there were. This thing seems to be surviving on its own. Let's just wait, see what happens, come back next summer.

My approach to conservation was literally hands off. So you come back the next year and count disfightly higher. They're like, okay, great. But then two years later, things started going like really badly. And then it was down and down from there. And they find out that one kind of little thriving vibrant population they had, it's gone.

So they're like, okay, what just happened? Nick does a little detective work and what he figures out is it's due to flooding. Was flooded over by a beaver? There are beavers at the base. Beavers build dams, dams cause water to build up. And then that water is enough to drown the caterpillars who are eating the grass like sedges.

So obviously no caterpillars, no butterflies. So Nick pieces that together, but pretty quickly another population goes down. And that one was because of a catastrophic wildfire that just scorched everything. These fires often get started because of the artillery range. And as you can imagine, these little paper thin wings of a butterfly do not do well with fire.

So here I was just keeping hands off approach to the butterfly's habitat and the butterfly started to decline. So he's thinking, okay, so my hands off approach didn't work, we need to do something. Maybe I have to go in and protect it. And seems pretty clear, the problems are flooding and fire, so let's just remove those problems So how does he get rid of the get rid of those problems? Well the fire is a bit harder to manage

Because it's more unpredictable, but the beavers he was like, yeah, we need to do something about those beavers There's truly only one person fit for this job in my office I became where I was kind of the beaver liaison for office office. Brian Ball, a biologist who works with the Army. So like when there's any kind of beaver issues, he's your guy. So Brian brings out the big guns. A beaver deceiver basically a pipe through the dam. And a beaver deceiver is what they do

is they take the dam and then they basically like, just punch a hole and then put a pipe through the dam so that like the water is still going, but the beaver doesn't realize. So the beaver deceiver. But it did not always deceive the beaver. And we destroyed the dam four or five times. They'd basically go in with their hands and just break up these dams. That didn't always work.

So I've put fences up, I think, four times. Still, the enemy would not give up. So in one case, they removed the beaver. I guess you could put it at least. They killed the beaver. Anyway, once the beaver is gone, no more disturbances. Nick thought, okay, now the butterflies can come back, but then... I call to get reports from my graduate students to get daily updates on where these butterflies in the places we've hoped, where there are abundances high enough to sustain the population.

And the answer to both those questions is, no. The butterflies just disappeared. He can't even tell why anymore. Another population was lost, the next year another, the next year another. There are years where he goes out, to places where butterflies were thriving the last time he was there, and now he doesn't even see a single one. It was very surreal. I mean, it was almost in an instant.

It was a...it was mind blowing how quick it happened. So they went from in the early 80s, 100 butterflies to the early 2000s, 1,700 butterflies to now in 2011, 75 butterflies. What had we done wrong? Nick himself is in really bad shape. Like the way he talks about it, he feels guilty. I mean it was frustrating, it was humiliating.

Here I am, the conservation biologist, the scientist thinking, I'm the one, I'm like the savior for this butterfly, and yet exactly the opposite is happening. Like imagine you're inheriting a thing at its best, and then you watch it and it slowly is slipping out of your fingers and then it gets to its worst it's ever been. Yeah, absolutely it weighs on you. We messed this up, you know, to think it's a piece of forever. Well, that's it for the butterfly. It's like, oh, if this now goes down,

it's me that's let planet Earth down on this. This butterfly was going extinct on my watch. So then what do you do? So what I haven't told you is that Nick had a sort of Hail Mary shot, which is that back in the early 90s long before Nick actually got there Some army people had seen these butterflies on an artillery testing range But that area was closed off to civilians Nick had never been allowed access. Why was it closed off to him? These are very serious places like like these are deadly places.

At some point in the year, bombs are going off 24-7. It's like just to give you a sense, like there was an explosion, where soul jurors, multiple soul, just special opsal jurors, three of them went to the hospital, one of them died. And while Nick was working there, they had had an incident where a civilian had snuck onto the base was trying to salvage scrap metal from old bombs.

And blew himself up and died. Oh my God. Given that circumstance, of course, the military to clamp down. So very dangerous place. And he doesn't even know the butterflies are still there. Like they were last seen decades ago. But Nick and his biologists colleagues feel like

this is just so crucial for this arrival of the species. So he's like, I have to go find out. They beg the folks in charge of the base to let them on the artillery range. And the power's to be agreed. So I arrived in North Carolina last night. Now the tape you're hearing, Nick recorded it back in 2020.

Okay, just went through bad you. No problem. That was quick. And that first time he was allowed to go on the condition that he go with. So I call it sounds of freedom. We got the sounds of freedom going off 24 hours a day here.

Tracy Johnson. Um, my expertise in the military was you know, ordinance called EOD explosive ordinance disposal. What is ordinance? Bombs, hand grenades, rockets, was you know ordinance. It called EOD, Exposed of Ornance Disposal. What is ordinance? Bombs, hampernades, rockets. Pretty much anything that goes boom. That's how I was in a situation where I was able to meet Nick.

And so for the first time, there I go. Nick is allowed to enter the artillery range. For the first trip, I remember it in detail. My eyes were wide open. I see 150 soldiers. Lines of soldiers were pointing their guns. Soldiers are being parachuted out of planes onto landing fields.

Well, thankfully I'm not that guy. Only up to carry a butterfly net. The thing you really notice is the explosion. Bombing areas continuously bombed or, you know, heart-tailery. Absolutely. Constant detonation of ordinance. Stop here waiting for confirmation

that we can go into the range. They have to wait for a green light to tell them that live fire has ceased. So eventually green light turns on. I'm like, all right, let's go. We head out to look at what the butterflies habitat looked like. And they start walking. They follow me because I got to go first and make sure that the path is clear that

there's nothing dangerous that they're going to step on. First Tracy, then Brian, who's pointing the way, and then I go in. Nick, and he's sort of in his head, he's picturing what he told me was picturing was this like, this pockmarked moonscape. Like, you know the image they have in like every high school history textbook

of like World War One trench warfare, bombed out trees and like just dirt and mud and like holes in the ground, like that kind of thing. Yeah. So that's what he's expecting. Oh shoot, just stepped over a big ordinance. I'm just looking on the ground for things that I might step on that I shouldn't be stepping on. And there's definitely some of that.

That one makes me nervous. I walked with... They're pretty sensitive. Wait, what do you mean sensitive? Trepidation. Well, it's not unusual for me to stumble into the water. But as they kept moving deeper and deeper into the range... We ended up in a swampy area.

Oh, me this... It's going through just a dense ticket of shrubs and by them getting scratched up by thorns and... You know the growth it gets thicker in places. Poison sumac just ended up in my face. There are more animals creeping around. I've seen the biggest snake I've ever seen in my life that day. Huge con mouth. A fat boy.

Yeah he's big. I've always been kind of a snake frog, salmander type person. And so I'm the one that's always looking for so much. Oh, it's such a one end of a log. It's a little jumpy out here today. So we break through the crash through the vines. This is pretty open and wet. Mixed as they came to these pockets where... Okay. Sedge abundance is picking up.

Honestly, my mouth was a gapet that it was so beautiful. What? It is a healthy wetland forest. Do you know what this flower is, Brian. All kinds of flowers. Hundreds of orchids. Beautiful purple flowers. They're all these birds.

Ah, Bobwhites in the background. Bobwhite quail. Red-techative woodpecker. It's like a sniffphony going on for sure. It is a garden of Eden. It really was. I mean it was incredible. So he's walking through this area.

My head's, you know, watching the ground and his heads up in the air, you know, looking for the butterflies. And pretty quickly, Tracy, she goes, Oh, wow. What do we have here? Oh, is that one of your butterflies? This little brown butterfly sitting on the underside of a leaf. And he's like, yeah, yeah, that's one of my butterflies. Let's see if it goes back to this flower.

Within a matter of seconds, I saw St. Francis Sater applying again. And then I walked on for a few more feet. And now here it is, here it is. Up there it is, right below you. And there was another and another and another. So there were 75 off the artillery range that he was like, preciously protecting and like holding onto his last gasp of the species.

And in 15 minutes, he just saw 50 of them. There they were. These things are thriving here. Like they're thriving. I was exhilarated. I mean, that's the only feeling I had is well exhilaration and relief. They appeared to be safe. Something that was happening inside the artillery ranges actually did a better job of managing habitats

for the butterfly than whatever we were doing outside the artillery ranges. Like why are they thriving here and not out there? What's different? What caused that dynamic? Like the butterflies are cheating on them or something. Like, he's like, what do they have that I don't? Like, what was the artillery range giving to you that I was not?

And what he starts to realize is basically that, like, everything he knows about the same friends, say to everything he knows about conservation, everything he knows about the same friends, say to everything he knows about conservation, everything he knows about life and death is wrong. So first, there's basically no people to mock with the ecosystem. For Bragg, there's got a lot of areas that aren't disturbed and haven't been disturbed for hundreds of years. You know, thanks to the the ranges And that creates that little pocket of opportunities.

Because there's no people, they leave beaver. So beavers, they create dams. Those dams, they do flood, they do drown those counterpillars, but they also do other things. Beaver a band in the dams, and it's behind those abandoned dams, where sediments have accumulated that provide rich soil that then plants can grow into, including, and especially the food for the butterfly is a big buffet.

But actually, the even more surprising thing is when it comes to the bombs, the butterflies weren't surviving on the testing ranges, despite the bombs, they were surviving because of the bombs. How is that possible? These are like the tiniest, flimsyest little creatures in the world. So the St. Francis Seder, they live in an environment in North Carolina that helps plants grow quickly. And so these grassy wetlands aren't grassy wetlands for long soon vines grow in, then

shrubs grow in, then trees go in, and those things, well they outcompete the grasses. So the explosions, the gunfire, I understand machine guns are actually very good at setting fires. And those fires kill butterflies, but they also thin out the trees. So thinner trees means more sunshine, more sunshine, and more space for grassy sedges to grow. More grassy sedges means more food for caterpillars, more food for coward perils, means more caterpillars, means more butterflies. Ordinance, they don't create a less natural world.

They create a more natural world. Wow. So the thing that he thought he needed to protect the butterflies from are actually the thing that's making them stronger. Exactly. And so this is where I had my biggest epiphany. Going into the artillery range, what I realized is my perception of butterflies as fragile was totally misplaced.

And like this whole time, he was exactly 180 degrees wrong. So he basically learns from this. He's like, okay, let's fucking go. I don't love saying fucking, but it just does work here. I basically went from no disturbance in our sights to all disturbance in our sights. He and Brian, they're like, let's get in there with chain-solves, let's tear up some stuff, cutting down trees, cut it up, bucket on our shoulders, and take it out. And then they would build dams as if they were bevers.

Dam them up, let's make a big mud hole, let's dam up some streams, and make sure we get some water on them. Hey, and while we're at it, let's start some fires. Brian, the biologist with the army army was telling me he basically goes around on the back of an ATV with like a flamethrower. Not that bad, not that bad. It's, it's, uh, there's a lot of science to it and there's a lot of art but you know, there's a, yeah, pretty close to a flamethrower, yeah. Yeah, pretty close to a flame-thuria.

And so we were able to create the wetlands that the butterflies needed. After that, they wait for a little bit. It took us about two years to see the semblance of success. Oh, you saw the first one, alright. So of course, what I'm counting them, I'm in competition with Brian to see the most butterflies. And I saw three at the last site. I'll usually give them a few before I start counting just to make them feel better. Oh, wow. So the head start kind of a thing. Yeah, give a head start. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a giver. After Nick started using those lessons to save the butterflies, the population off of the ranges has rebounded from less than 100 to over 3000.

I got another one. So they're doing better than they've ever done before. Wow. Oh, shoot, I see two more right now. So that's six seven for me. When the butterflies start flying, well, that's exhilarating every time I see them. So now we're at 11, 12, 13, 13, okay, that's 14 then. What I realized in the end is that you have to kill some butterflies to save butterfly populations. Saving and killing as these two discrete things that are opposites and separate from each other, but they're just so weirdly marbled all up in each other.

And I hate saying that because when there's only 3,000 butterflies left in the world, how can you justify killing any butterflies? But with the next step of new habitat regenerating that will be good for the butterflies? Better, that'll actually create foster more than you're killing. Yes, exactly.

There it is, Brian, if I don't get it, it's coming right towards you. All right, 24, 25, up 28, 30, 35. Dang, they're everywhere in here. 38. Oh my gosh. Well there's one but in a place I never see them. This one is about. So this is weird to admit, and I've never actually done this in a story before. But that was supposed to be the end day. What you just heard, that was the story I pitched, that was the story I reported, that was the story I wanted to tell.

But then as I was finishing the reporting, I talked to somebody, somebody integral to the same ancestor, Seder's story, who took Nick's lesson, killing in order to save life, springing forth from death, and pushed it further, took it to a whole new level, a level that shocked me, and that made Nick very uncomfortable. That's after the break. This is Bree calling from Austin, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred Peace Loan Foundation, enhancing public understanding That's after the break. Simon's Foundation Initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

Okay, so now I want to do something sort of different. Yeah, go for a little weird. I'm going to start the same story over, but from a different point of view. Okay. June 2nd, 1983. A sweltering. A sweltering. Yeah. It is a sweltering day. I was 10 years old. Not that this has anything to do with me, so it continued. It was a sweltering day at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A 19 year old soldier is tromping through the muddy wetland, and he notices something.

It's brown, and it's about the size of a quarter, and it's fluttering through the tall grass around him, and it is a butterfly. Hmm. Now, this soldier, his name is Thomas Crawl, he has been a butterfly collector since he was six years old, and he knows enough about them to look he was six years old, and he knows enough about them to look at this one and say, this is something different.

And a few years later, he actually ends up co-authoring a paper saying basically it is a new subspecies of butterfly, very few left, all on Fort Bragg, and because of that, it says in the paper, we need to protect this thing. And he also names it. So he calls it the St. Francis Sater after the patron saint of animals. Now that paper is the thing that Nick our guy from the first part

based the last almost 20 years of his professional life on. It helps get the butterfly on the Indian species list and that's why the military ends up calling Nick and then Nick gets involved in the way, you know, the rest of that story. What we're gonna do right now is follow Tom's story. Okay. He leaves Fort Bragg and becomes a real estate appraiser.

So this is now we're in kind of the early 90s. Around this time, US Fish and Wildlife raided Tom's house. Oh, before I forget, these are the butterflies that we charged out. Oh, those are really nice. So we're talking to a guy who is actually on that raid. His name is Chris Nagano. I spent 27 years working on endangered species at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Okay, great. So, turns out Tom was not just an enthusiast of butterflies. He was an avid collector, including collecting butterflies, that you're not supposed to collect. Butterflies from protected sites listed butterflies.

So, Chris and his team show up at Tom's house in Tucson, Arizona. We got there. His father was there. We said, we're Fish and Wildlife here to hear Exkita Warn's Tom here. And he said, we're fishing wildlife here to hear ex-Kita Warren's Tom here, and he said, no, he's out collecting. So they start going through stuff. He had crystalids in his refrigerator, books and articles all over the bedroom, and about an hour into the search. He got home with animals he had been collecting.

Oh my God. He never were a bunch of farts. But after getting over the surprise of there being a bunch of fuzz. But after getting over the surprise of there being a bunch of federal agents in his house, he agrees to walk them through his collection. Yeah. Butterfly by Butterfly. You know, and his collection rivaled major museums

in the world. He had a room filled with cabinets, and the cabinets were filled with butterflies, almost 100,000 specimens, including super rare ones. I mean, the guy was just a machine, you know, I could point, you know, to a random butterfly, any one of the thousands in time could go, yeah, you know, I caught that on this trip and, you know, it was, you know, feeding on this kind of flower. Like, he just was very, very, he knew his collection very, very well. You know, these guys, I mean, they know a lot.

But there's one detail in all of this that really, really stuck with me. So Tom, they didn't just bust Tom. They busted a couple of other collectors too. And in so doing, they found letters that all of these collectors were sending to each other, including Tom was sending, talking about, you know, where to find the best butterflies and how to evade detection. And one of those letters from Tom, the way he signed it was, yours in mass murder, Tom, whoa, yours in mass murder.

I mean, the guy who discovered this butterfly and wrote a paper saying, like, there's so few of them left, we need to protect them. Also is signing letters saying yours in mass murder and is involved in this like massive butterfly poaching ring. Like, I felt like I just needed to talk to him. Totally, yeah.

And I was like, trying to track him down, I could not find him, could not find him, could not find him. And then I found him. Thomas Crow. Hi, Thomas. How you doing? totally yeah and i was like trying to track them down i could not find them could not find them could not find them and then i found them thomas crow hi thomas how you doing do you go by thomas tom oh thomas fine i should say really quickly that tom he argued he was confused by the laws he did plead guilty uh in exchange for essentially a slap on the wrist no jail time

but when i told him i was interested in talking about the St. Francis Seder, which was not one of the butterflies he was charged for, he was super game to talk. This is a far larger story than I think you initially signed up for. So I was like, okay, let's do it. I was 19 years old and I started collecting butterflies on Fort Bragg. So he told me the whole story about finding the butterfly. These looked a little different.

So that day I caught maybe about eight or so that day. But then when he got to the paper that he wrote about it, you know, unfortunately looking back, I was manipulated. He actually claimed that the reviewers and the editors at that journal pushed him into saying things that he says weren't true, or at least leaving out key details. For example, the paper says the butterfly is only on Fort Bragg. Tom says he saw them in other places too. In a couple places I caught individuals off base of Fort Brack. And on top of that, I had caught hybrid or intermediate specimens between that and the

Georgia Sator, and they left that out of the paper. The way that it came across in the paper, it's like, oh my god, it's about to die. But the way Tom puts it, if it's mixing with other species, you know, this is natural selection taking place it's not dying it's just assimilating into the family next door this butterfly really isn't going extinct it's going extinct in that form but it's genetic uh... you know that everybody seems to be concerned about continues on in another population basically what tom is saying is that the dwindling populations of this butterfly are

just no big deal. Which for me as a reporter, I'm like, he just pulled the rug out from the entire story I just did. Did he convincingly pull out the rug? Or did he? I mean, honestly, I wasn't sure. Like, I mean, I checked out the journal totally scientifically legit. I talked to the editor at the time, he remembered it,

said that there was nothing weird about the review or the editing, he still stands by it. And when it comes to the science, you know, the things that Tom says he actually saw, I figured I should just put it in front of Nick. Have you ever met him or talked to him before? No, I've met him. Okay, so he just started out by telling him,

first of all, Tom said he found St. Francis St.ators off the base off of Fort Bragg. Wow. But he didn't write about that. That is new. And at first Nick was like, that would be so great. That is critically important knowledge if he. Yeah. It done up by the place. But then Tom was a bit vague about where exactly. And then when he named a certain spot, Nick was like, oh, my team and I, we already looked at it. We're working on that right now. And a whole bunch of other places nearby.

We've searched in the most likely places and based on our best knowledge and the guidance that we can get from remote sensing or from experts in the area, but they had not found even a single one. Never found it. Okay, another thing he said, and I told him that Tom said that the St. Francisator was just mixing with this other group, hybridizing with the Georgia Sator. No, that's not happening. In this case, Nick was just like, nope, no way. We've thought about that a lot. We've actually studied the Georgia Sator. We've tried to figure out if this is happening, but these two butterflies...

They're different in how they look. They're different in how they behave. They're different in their DNA. And they're different in where they are on the landscape, you know. There's some remote chance, but no, they do not hybridize. So Nick had me back to, okay, if you look at the science, if you look at the studies, you look at the evidence, this thing is super rare.

It is not mixing with the neighbors. It really is, if we don't save it, it really is going to disappear. I actually put all this back in front of Tom, mixed reaction, and Tom was not convinced. So, how do we know what it's true ranges or if people find it true? Okay, so did you believe at the time that this ought to have been an endangered species?

Absolutely not. Did I ever think that this thing should have been listed as endangered? That I absolutely not. I mean, I got the sense, like a pretty clear sense, that he sees conservation science as totally politicized. And I think, you know, there's a chunk of that that it has to do with his past experience. But there was also something that ran deeper than that, I think.

You know, he was arguing that little subspecies of butterflies, like the same ancestor that are so small, so marginal, it just isn't worth the effort to save it at that point. There isn't. I hate to say it, but insects, not an aggregate, but as individual species, they're minor players, picking one or two entities and things are endangered, it becomes ludicrous.

Sounds like a good way to justify collecting species to extinction and have a better collection. So. Which is a fair point by Nick. But at the same time, this was a question I was asking myself as I was learning about Nick's work, you know, nearly 20 years of tromping through bomb fields. And it's a question I've heard lots of people ask, including some scientists, you know nearly twenty years of trumping through bomb field uh... and it's a question i've heard lots of people ask including some scientists you know should we be picking out these little itty bitty things that there's just a

few left of and you know put a lot of resources into trying to save them insects are vast i mean uh... you just in terms of butterflies in north america there's over seven hundred kinds there's several hundred different you know additional sub-species and this just really becomes one of you know thousands of other types of butterflies like from times p.o.v

uh... it's like if i hadn't discovered this thing in the first place you wouldn't even care about it but i'm saying is there's better places to put your limited conservation dollars. This is an argument that Nick has to face all the time. Honestly, I struggle with this one because you can, like St. Francis Sator, you cannot make the argument that they're pollinators

or prey in their ecosystem that matter to anything. St. Francis Sator matters to zero flowers. Dragonflies and spiders eat St. Francis Seder's, but they're so few of them, like they can make a fraction of one individual. Dragonflies diet. It's not easy to come up with a practical or feel good reason to save a creature like the St. Francis Seder.

But especially as we are now in the middle of what's I just call the insect apocalypse, which you know, because of pollination and food chains,, which, you know, because of pollination and food chains and everything, you know, ripples out into a wider ecological disaster. Folks like Nick have to find like a little spot of territory to protect in that larger battle, right? He has to answer like, why should we care about this butterfly? And Nick, he really just lands on a simple moral point.

What's caused them to decline isn't some background rate of evolution. It's people that have drained wetlands, shape, have put fields, farm fields, or houses on butterfly or next to butterfly habitat. And it's like once we find out that it exists, like to do nothing is to let it die. The reason to protect them in the end is an ethical one. We people shouldn't be the cause of extinction. This is on us, yeah. Have you seen it yet?

I've not seen it yet. Super wet out here, there. Whoa, shit. Whoa shit! Two? I think I didn't see that. Oh, damn it. Alright, this is where I'm going to see him right here. Still nothing. Quick note in the time since we started reporting this, the number of St. Francis' haters has gone back down for mysterious reasons.

They're hovering around 200. So Nick once again has a fight on his hands. In a half hour I expect to see, I don't know, at least 30 butterflies seem too so far. Waiting through chest-type burns. This story was reported by me, a lot of NASA produced by Rachel Q. with music from Jeremy Bloom and mix Help from Arianne Whack, as usual. And then there's more things you're going to say, right? Yeah, and special thanks to Snookie Pooley, Sita Escalano, Jeffrey Glassberg, Margot Williams, Mark Roman, Elizabeth Long,

the public affairs and endangered species branches at Fort Bragg. Before we go, I just want to say that coming up, not now, but in a week, is a baller series from our producer Simon Adler starting next week. And it's not about butterflies, but it is about a thing that you might have overlooked, a piece of technology that no one thinks about, but it actually determined everything about the world. As we live in from the internet to the little phone in your hand that's listening to my voice right now,

and Simon is going to take you literally around the world in a short time. Yes! Through time, through space, and he wrote all the music for this thing, and just like, it was a true feat of one man doing everything, and it's kind of mind blowing. I know that we will disappoint you inevitably at some point at Radio Lab, but it won't happen in the next five weeks,

that I can assure you. So. What a problem. Don't unsubscribe, yeah. That starts next week. Okay, we should go. Okay, thanks for listening. Bye. The album was created by Chad Abemrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Susie Lektenberg is our executive producer and Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Snduniana Sambandum, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Cari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Tanya Chavla, Shima Uliai, Sarah Sambok, and Candice Wong. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.