Short Wave - The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

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. Want to hear more on the animals that surround us? Email us your ideas to [e-mail] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.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, short wavers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, let's talk about what makes shortwave possible. Shortwave is possible because of you. Because we work for NPR, and NPR is public media. We exist not to make money, but to create a more informed public. You can think of public media like a public sidewalk or a public park. It's infrastructure that we all use. It's free. It's for everyone.

And that's why we work really hard to bring you stories about science that matter to you. no matter where you live or what community you belong to. We love doing this work. And this time of year, I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening and for your support. And if this is a mission you believe in and you have the ability to throw a few dollars our way, I want to remind you that Giving Tuesday is almost here. So it is really the perfect time to keep the short wave train running and free. One way to do this is by signing up for NPR Plus. You'll get sponsor-free episodes and all kinds of perks across more than 25 podcasts within the NPR portfolio. Just visit plus.npr.mpr.org. That link is in our episode notes. The other way you can give is simply by making

a donation at donate.npr.org. Your gifts are tax deductible either way. All right, grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Back to the show. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwaver's Emily Kwong here with science correspondent Nate Rot. Emily, hello. Lately, we've 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

and a western population that shelters along the Pacific coast of California, where you live, Nate. Have you seen any California monarchs this year? One of my dogs, like favorite parks, is right next to these big eucalyptus trees that the monarchs overwinter in. And it's very cute. You know, he's like prancing around in the dewy grass and the morning light. But it's also like terrifying, right? Because I'm like, dude, do not catch one of those monarch butterflies.

And thankfully he is not. Every one of those monarch butterflies is becoming increasingly precious for reasons that we are going to be talking about today. Yeah, absolutely. And that's because, as you well know, Emily, monarch populations here on the West Coast and pretty much like 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, you know, the world's clearinghouse for the species at risk of extinction, put monarch butterflies on their so-called red list as threatened. 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.

Right. Through all of these like really creative approaches. I looked into this little bit abroad. One of the approaches I came across was planting trees. trees. Qualtimex Sines Romero at the University of Michua Khan in Mexico led an effort to assist monarch migration by planting over 1,000 Oiaml fir trees at higher and colder elevations. His team hopes that those sites could be protected for longer from climate change. Maybe the monarchs can change the migration road a bit to go to the new places. 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. Nate, what else, though, is happening to save the monarchs in the U.S.? There's all sorts of big conservation efforts that are currently ongoing in the U.S., but there's one big thing that you should really be thinking about with monarchs as we enter the next couple of months. Okay. The monarch butterfly, while it is listed internationally as vulnerable, it is not listed in the U.S. 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. So today on the show, we look at the decision that's got the butterfly world a flutter. Pun excused. And we look at the challenge of protecting a species that's habitat could be your backyard.

You are listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so Nate, since you live in California, is your life just one surrounded by monarch butterflies? It kind of depends on the time of year, right? So these are migrating species. So there's times where there's tons of them here in coastal California, and there's times that 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? And when the larvae eat the sap, it makes them not taste good. So this is Karen Sinclair, by the way. Whoa. So they're just low grade poisoning themselves to not taste good? Yeah, and that's the reason why monarch butterflies and their caterpillars are so colorful. They are telling the world in all the predators, hey, I don't taste good. If you eat me, you'll feel really sick.

So please go away. So I had no idea about this. But the reason that I met with Karen wasn't 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. And the number of times I have had the locals walk up to us and they go, what are you doing? We're like, oh, we're countinging 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. So scientists think today we only see about five. of the number of monarch butterflies it 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%. Nate, that honestly surprises me. I didn't realize it had dropped by that much. 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. Okay, so that's like a month away. Do we know what Fish and Wildlife is going to say? Emily, do we know anything about anything? True. True. I'm point made. You know, I asked Emma Peltin, an endangered species biologist at the Xercese 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. 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. Okay. What would that mean to her for the monarch butterfly to be listed by fish and wildlife? So this is where I think it gets really interesting.

Emma wants and thinks the sign supports the monarch butterfly being listed as threatened, not endangered. 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. And that like distinction between threatened and endangered is really important. Because a species that gets listed as endangered in the U.S. 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. But if it's listed as threatened, you can mess with them? So it depends. In some cases, depending on what they rule, you could. I don't want to get too far down

the technical, wonky path of environmental law, because I don't think anyone wants to go down that path. But if the 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. 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 be taken off the plate. Monarchs are absolutely 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. 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. So at least for part of the year, right, like when they're migrating through. Are there concerns that a threatened status level could offer too much flexibility in a way that would hurt the monarch? So I asked Emma the exact same thing. This is like the really rich vein of this whole decision. I think we are all really. interested and awaiting what they're going to say because I think the devil's going to be in the

details. And that's because there's 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 Rawlins, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center. And a huge push for that has been getting farm. is 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. And remember, this is a species that migrates through nearly every state in a country where most of the land is privately owned.

So you need buy-in from private landowners in the U.S. if you really want to protect the monarch. 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. And it could limit where they plow and plant crops. 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. 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. 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 going to take place under a new presidential administration.

One, I love that you manage 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? 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. 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. So I would not be surprised to see that again. 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 the 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 U.S. state. So Emma says this is kind of like a test. How do we get large-scale landscape conservation moving without creating a lot of regulatory fear? One of the monarch scientists I talked to was a plant and insecticologist 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. Especially in the U.S., we all grew up with the idea that 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've got to deal with that. 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. Me too. I will be reading with great interest in earnest.

Surrounded by the monarch butterflies of California. Yes, of course. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones, check 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 Shortwave from NPR.