Short Wave - Migrating Monarchs

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

It is one of the Earth's great migrations: each year, millions of monarch butterflies fly some 3,000 miles, from their summer breeding grounds as far north as Canada to their overwintering sites in the central Mexico. It's one of the best-studied migrations and in recent years, ecologists like Sonia Altizer have been able to better answer how and why these intrepid butterflies make the journey. Short Wave brings this episode from the TED Radio Hour's episode with Sonia Altizer, with the University of Georgia. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Duna Rino's, Maddie Safaya here. And Emily Kwong. So we've got a couple big announcements to share, some good news and some sad news. What do we do first, them? I want to do the good news first. Always, always. Okay, you're right. So as you might have noticed, you've been hearing a little bit more hosting from Emily Kwong, you lucky little ducks.

You're so sweet. That's right. And I can share now that I have officially stepped into the co-host seat. So you'll be hearing a little more hosting from me. Honestly, I love this for us, you know? And congrats, bud. Thank you. Thank you, Maddie.

Okay, now on to the sad news, and there is no easy way to say this, so I'm going to say it really fast. Like a Band-Aid, boo. Rip it off, like a Band-Aid. All right. Okay. Maddie has decided to leave Shortwave in the fall. Yes. Our founding host and one of the visionaries behind Shortwave is departing NPR.

This is big news to process. And it's news we wanted to share with the people who we do this for. You are Shortwave listeners. Yeah, it's true. full sappy goodbye to come, but for now, let me just say that it has been the honor of my... Ooh, I'm really going to cry. Okay. You got this.

Okay. It has been the honor of my life to work on this show alongside my amazing colleagues and to bring you science every weekday. I'm bummed to be leaving, but to be honest, working on a daily science show in the middle of a pandemic is extremely demanding. And stepping away is the best move for me and my family. I'm not sure what I'm up to next, but I am excited for some new adventures. Maddie, you are such an amazing person. You've been guiding so many of us, including me through this pandemic.

And I think the whole team would agree that we are really proud of you for doing what's right for you. And we'll be cheering you on in whatever you do next because you're a part of it, it's going to be amazing. Plus, I mean, come on. I'm not leaving until the fall. True. Which in shortwave time is like 500. episode. Let's be real. This is facts, facts. And

I fully intend to keep reporting and contributing to the show once in a while after I leave. You can't get rid of me that easy. You can't. Yeah, I'm telling myself that. We have three more months together to make shortwave magic and also to find a new co-host to fill your big, stinky, microbe laden shoes.

Right? So we'll have so much more to say about this later. But for now, enjoy today's show. It's from our friends at TED Radio Hour. And thank you from all of us for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody, Maddie here.

Today we've got something fun for you from another NPR podcast, TED Radio Hour. It's from a recent show all about migration. In this excerpt, they take us on the unbelievable journey monarch butterflies take every year. Host Manus Samarodi talks to ecologist Sonia, about how they know when to take off, the threats they face, and what we can do to help them out. There are some primo butterfly facts in this one, y'all. So good. All right, that's coming up next. On the show today, migration. There are many hundreds, if not thousands of species of birds that migrate.

There's caribou across Canada, wildebeest in Africa. There are migratory fish like salmon and also a lot of marine animals. migrate long distances like sea turtles and whales. But right now, let's turn our attention to the humble but tenacious monarch butterfly. I think of monarchs as the tanks of the butterfly world. So they're small. They weigh only a half a gram, but they can travel thousands of kilometers in the wild. This is Sonia Altizer. I'm an ecologist at the University of Georgia, so I study the ecology of animal migration.

And Sonia says monarch butterflies are different because their migration is multi-generational. So the same monarch never makes the journey twice. It's their grand offspring and great grand offspring of the migratory generation that will migrate again the following year. Sonia is specifically talking about a migration path east of the Rocky Mountains. These monarchs travel thousands of miles across interoperations. international borders every year. Ecologists think they're looking for the precious milkweed plant. Inarguably, the most important driver for them is food,

and especially milkweed plants where the females can lay their eggs. Another reason why they migrate is to ride out the winter in the Sierra Madre Mountains near Mexico City. So there might be 10 million butterflies or more in a single colony. and these colonies would be densely packed butterflies that are hanging in these beautiful fur forests. And so they're carpeting the trunks of trees. And it's almost like the butterflies spend the winter in the refrigerator. And then the temperature does warm up, especially as the overwintering season progresses into the spring.

And these clusters will sort of burst open, almost like orange confetti. fluttering through the sky. Does it make a sound when they burst open like that? It does. So it's almost like a very gentle wind or rustling of leaves. And sometimes the air is so thick with butterflies, that it might be hard to see a person standing 50 meters away just because there's so many butterflies flying through the air. By early March, it's time to procreate.

So the butterflies leave the mountains for northern Mexico and Texas to lay their eggs on milkweed, the only plant that their caterpillars will eat. But by this time, they're really old. So they've been alive for about nine months, and eventually they die. And then it takes time for their offspring to develop. But by May, this new generation is ready to continue the journey north. And the part of the United States that we refer to as the corn belt, so Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and even farther north into Michigan and southern Canada. There, the butterflies have enough milkweed, nectar, and sun to stay put and cycle through one,

even two more generations. But then the last generation at the end of the summer, it's the shorter day lengths and the cooler temperatures that signal to those butterflies, that generation, that is time to get ready to migrate. And so instead of producing eggs and mating and hanging out in milkweed patches, those butterflies instead tank up on nectar, they build up their fat reserves and they head south towards the overwintering sites in Mexico. And so they have to be in a special physiological state to be able to successfully make that migration. Huh. So they keep the species going, but it's this, I mean, I'm sorry, but describing a but.

is fat is like, I've seen fat caterpillars, but I've never seen a fat butterfly. Yeah, they are butterballs in the fall and winter. And it's important that they build up those fat reserves because they not only need the energy to fuel the migration, but they have to live off of their fat reserves for five months at the overwintering sites and also use them to fuel that journey partway back north again. Here's Sonia Altizer on the TED stage. Now this migration of monarchs is one of the Earth's last great migrations. But around the world, a lot of these great migrations have disappeared or disappearing due to things that we, as people, are doing to them and their habitats.

Their losses change the entire ecology of ecosystems and they're impossible to replace. Like these other migrations, monarch migration is declining. too. In fact, the last three consecutive years have been the lowest numbers of monarchs ever recorded in Mexico, so low, in fact, that scientists estimate migratory monarchs have declined by 90%. So if monarchs were people, this would be like losing every person living in the United States, except for those in Ohio and Florida. Now, what are the causes of this monarch decline? Well, unfortunately, there's a lot of different challenges facing monarchs, ranging from climate change and drought to deforestation and illegal logging in Mexico, even car strikes along roads during the fall

migration. One of the more ominous threats has been the loss of milkweed plants in agricultural habitats due to shifting agricultural practices. So it might surprise you to hear that what we eat affects food that's available to the monarchs. So you actually link the monarch's well-being to how we humans grow our food. Can you just explain what that link is, what the connection is between the two? Well, so monarchs need milkweed. Milkweed isn't the only resource that they need. They also need nectar plants.

But milkweed is the key resource that monarchs need to reproduce. And it's an agricultural weed. And so you would find it along road sides, even country roads or gravel roads. It would be growing in and around corn fields and around other row crops and orchards. And so one thing that has become popular since the late 1990s are crops that are genetically modified to resist common herbicides like Roundup. And the herbicides can be sprayed on crop fields of soybean or corn. And the crops do just fine. but milk weeds and other agricultural weeds that would be providing nectar for monarchs would die.

So you suggest that one way to help stem the decline is to buy non-GMO food. But GMOs have been around for, what, nearly 30 years now. Is that even possible anymore? That's an interesting question. I mean, certainly we can use our purchasing power as consumers to buy sustainably sourced crops. or agriculture, so buy local, buy organic. It's probably too late to turn the clock on GMO crops. And it is a controversial topic.

So the technology itself isn't harmful or evil. It's just the way that these crops have been deployed and the scale at which they've been deployed. It means that we're growing food now in a way that doesn't leave room for other biodiversity. And so these agro ecosystems have become, you really, almost ecological deserts, if you will. So is there anything else we can do? Like, I guess, plant monarch-friendly gardens, plant more milkweed?

Definitely planting milkweed, but especially native milkweeds, is something that people can do to help them. And, again, being aware that it's not just milkweeds that monarchs need, it's nectar plants and other resources, too. And if you plant habitats and gardens for monarchs and other pollinators, you'll be helping dozens of other species as well. And so it's realizing that monarchs are part of these complicated food webs that involve birds and spiders and ants and other plant species,

even parasites that attack them. And certainly milkweed is a critical part of that, and there are other parts too. One of my dreams is to be able to take my kids to the overwintering sites in central Mexico to let them be able to see what it's like to stand in a forest full of millions of butterflies. And so to see that declining, to see those migrations unraveling does make me sad. At the same time, they are resilient. And they can acclimate or adapt to a wide range of conditions.

And so they do exist in places in the world where they don't undergo long-distance migrations. So there are native resident monarch populations throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. And monarchs more recently colonized the Pacific Islands. They've also recently crossed the Atlantic. They've crossed the Atlantic, like literally, do you think? Yes, they have. And so one interesting fact about monarchs is that in England, people used to call them storm fridilaries in historic times because they would occasionally blow over with big storms.

think, you know, so people thought that they maybe naturally just blew across the Atlantic in storms. It also seems likely that monarchs have hitched a ride with people to different places around the world on trade ships, for example. But in a lot of these places monarchs breed you around and don't undergo long-distance migrations. And so how these tiny insects can show such a wide range of behavioral responses to different environments is fascinating to me. And so I think a lot of us are trying to figure out what's going to be the new normal. Yeah, I mean, the new normal sounds like it's not great for these butterflies. There's a lot we humans keep doing to cause problems for them. So does that mean that in addition to studying them, we also need to start enacting laws to protect them?

You know, one of the great challenges with protecting migratory species is that they don't see or respond to or respect geopolitical boundaries. And, So we need to think about ways of engaging in conservation that cross these boundaries, which are really just artificial constructs of people and nations. And you really reflect on the fact that for most of life on earth, movement is not only a part of their life, it's essential to the persistence of these species. That's Sonia Altizer. She's an ecologist at the University of Georgia.

You can learn more about her research and what we humans can do to help the monarch butterfly at ted.npr.org. Special thanks to our friends at TED Radio Hour. Shortwave is made by Thomas Liu, Rebecca Ramirez, Britt Hanson, Emily Kwong, Indy Kara, Viet Le, Giselle Grayson, and me, Maddie Safaya. We're back tomorrow with a new episode of Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.