Last week the International Union for the Conservation of Nature categorized the migrating monarch butterfly as “endangered.” The United States has not listed monarch butterflies under the Endangered Species Act, but the ICUN is considered a comprehensive authority on the status of species. Scientists say climate change and habitat loss have contributed to the species’ decline. Emma Pelton is the Western Monarch lead at Oregon’s Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. She tells us what is being done in the Pacific Northwest to attempt to save the monarch.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Monarch butterflies, whose populations have plummeted, were just categorized as endangered. Not by the US Government, but by an organization called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. For more on why monarchs are struggling and what this news could mean, I’m joined by Emma Pelton. She is a conservation biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation which is based in Portland. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Emma Pelton: Thanks so much for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. What is this International Union for the Conservation of Nature?
Pelton: They’ve got this wonderful product called the Red List. It’s really the gold standard in terms of understanding the global or regional status of any animal. There are thousands of animals that have been assessed in a standardized process. It goes through a pretty rigorous review, and then it falls into categories about the status of that animal. It’s really a way that gets above our political and our geographic boundaries to have a good grasp on how an animal is doing and what its conservation concerns are.
Miller: What did they say last week?
Pelton: The news that broke last week was actually the monarch was just part of many species that get assessed on an annual basis. And they released these updates. One of them was that the monarch was assessed at a global level, and for North America for the first time. And those assessments found that at a global level, monarchs are at least concern, which is not surprising because there are populations outside of North America.
But in North America, they did this other assessment, and they found that monarchs qualify under their criteria as being endangered, which led to a lot of headlines and interest, because it’s the first time that we’ve had this international body say that this this incredible migration that we see here in North America is really in trouble, and they qualify under their criteria.
Miller: Does this international union, this organization, have any official power?
Pelton: No. I think there is a little bit of confusion in the public, and I certainly got some questions from folks I work with and family members saying “are monarchs endangered? I’m confused.” And so just to clear the air on that. There’s this whole entirely separate process for an animal to be added to a state or federal endangered species act, which is often in the US when we say something is endangered, we’re referring to that legal process that can hold a lot more power in terms of how we interact with that animal and its habitat.
This listing is totally separate. But it came to the same conclusion, that monarchs need our help, and that there is a big conservation concern. Right now the status in the US federally, monarchs are a candidate species, which means that the US Fish and Wildlife service said that they warrant protection, they deserve protection, but that they have other animals that are of higher priority to develop conservation plans for right now. So we’re kind of in this holding pattern in the US legally, and the monarch continues to have no legal protection.
Miller: Can you remind us what exactly US Fish and Wildlife said about monarchs in December of 2020, and what they said about their own resources as an agency?
Pelton: I can only speak to this from the outside. I work for a nonprofit, and we were one of the petitioners to have the monarch assessed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. I’m not Fish and Wildlife Service, I don’t fully understand their inner workings. But they concluded in December of 2020 that the monarch was warranted, but precluded. Which essentially means they did their own huge rigorous assessment of the status of migratory monarchs, and of monarchs at the global level, and concluded that monarchs do need protection, that they qualify under their criteria, but that they have too much on their work plans. And that’s been true for a long time. And so sometimes they bump animals into this kind of candidate category.
But it was interesting and notable that this is such a widespread animal with so much public attention. So the fact that they tried to kind of put it in this other category, that they had higher priorities, I think was kind of an interesting call on their end. Their work plan is that they would list the monarch in fiscal year 2024.
Miller: As an outsider and an advocate for butterflies and other invertebrates, what’s your best understanding of how much that decision not to list butterflies as endangered was about a lack of federal resources, as opposed to, say, lobbying from developers or farmers?
Pelton: I don’t know, so I don’t really want to speculate. But I do think the service is in an interesting position because this animal is so widespread. How they rule on it and how they would decide to enforce rules if they chose to list it, there’s a lot of questions about how they would do that. And typically when we think of animals that they list, they tend to be animals that have really restricted ranges. Listing the rusty patched bumblebee was an example of another invertebrate where there are a few states that that’s going to have an impact on, and we need to come up with habitat conservation plans and really think about how to implement it in those areas where they’re suitable habitat.
Because the monarch is migratory, because it’s in all the lower states, it will be a bigger challenge for them to implement. And so in some ways, probably politically, it was a smart move to punt it, to say “let’s see what the populations do. Let’s see if all the conservation attention leads to increased population.” So they pushed it down the road. And exactly why they did that is kind of interesting.
But they did conclude that they deserve protection, which I think is a really big big thing. At the end of the day, even though they didn’t get protection, the federal government agrees that they deserve it.
Miller: I want to hear more about what listing would actually mean. You’ve just introduced a really important piece here, that monarchs as a migratory species, they’re found in every single state in this country, which could cause all kinds of interesting challenges in terms of conservation. But we haven’t actually talked yet about why it is that monarchs are struggling. Just in terms of numbers, can you give us a sense for how much they’ve plummeted, both on the western migratory side, and on the eastern one?
Pelton: Yeah, this definitely came out in both assessments, by the federal government, and then by the IUCN. There’s actually really good monitoring that happens in coastal California. I’m a little biased because our organization helps organize those counts. But we rely on over 100 community scientists up and down the coast of California to estimate the butterflies during an annual thanksgiving count period. And so based on our estimates, and thanks to the help of hundreds of community scientists over the years, we’ve estimated that the numbers have gone down about 95% Since the 1980s. A massive decline. And those numbers bounce around. So the year before we were at like a 99.9% decline. This year, we’re thinking a little bit was more of a 95% decline. But no matter what, huge, huge declines, an order of magnitude or two. And that’s pretty hard for most people to argue with. We’ve seen huge declines in that population.
In the east, the monarchs that migrate to Central Mexico, and tend to be a little bit more famous and made the cover of National Geographic in the 70s and things like that, those declines have been a little bit more modest, but still pretty significant. And so there were estimates, anywhere from they’re down by a third, they’re down by two thirds, some older estimates more in the range of 70-80%. But no matter what, significant declines in both populations.
And why we’ve gotten where we’ve gotten is very much an area of fierce debate, fierce research. There’s a lot of people trying to understand why those declines happened, and what we can do to reverse them. But the big theme that comes out, where there’s common agreement and research, is that we’ve lost habitat. And that includes the milkweed host plant that caterpillars rely on. It includes the nectar plants those adult butterflies need to fuel their migration. And that there are a lot of entities that contribute to that, including how we grow our cities, how we manage our urban landscapes, how we farm. And that all of that together has led to that decline of breeding habitat.
We also know that overwintering sites are not in great shape, and in California, there continues to be no meaningful legal protection for overwintering sites, we continue to lose them especially to development.
And then finally pesticides, and that includes herbicides, which kill plants, and insecticides, which target insects. We are continuing to understand that in the age of the anthropocene, and with our biodiversity crises, that a lot of these chemicals that we spray, often for aesthetic reasons, sometimes for human health reasons, and sometimes for agricultural reasons, that we should have more nuanced conversations about where we can make cutbacks. There is a lot of contamination in our environment, and that can really affect some of our smallest insect visitors, including monarchs.
And then finally climate change, but we think that’s kind of a nuanced story, and it’s not so clean cut.
Miller: In what ways is climate change a complicated question when it comes to butterflies?
Pelton: I think climate change is kind of an interesting one, because often when it’s warmer, in a really simplistic way, insects do better. They can kind of optimize all that extra heat in those warm days to have more generations, to maybe speed through their life cycles. And so there can be some short term benefits to warmer spring.
But over time, there’s been good research to show that hotter summers and falls and warmer nighttime temps have negative impacts on insect development. Because you have this ectotherm, they’re directly affected by the environment. But we do know things like more severe droughts, are really negative impacts over the long term on monarch habitat.
Meanwhile, wildfire is kind of an interesting one because a lot of milkweeds like and do well when there is disturbance like wildfire. So it’s not so easy to say wildfire is bad for monarchs, because it depends on where it, depends on when, it depends on the extent. And so there’s kind of this complicated swirl of climate change impacts. And a lot of work has shown that we don’t think that climate change in and of itself is the major driver for decline in monarchs. But it could make things harder for an already stressed population, and could lead to more stochastic events, like a severe storm that impacts them more severely than it would have in the past, if those populations were bigger and more robust.
Miller: Is the decline of monarchs a harbinger of other species declines, species that are maybe less showy and famous and beloved?
Pelton: You’ve hit on one of my favorite points to make with folks, which is we’re really trying to think of the monarch as a flagship, because it’s one that a lot of people really love and gravitate towards, and it’s really familiar, and it’s found in so many places. So getting people excited about monarchs I think gets to open the door to that conversation about all these other butterflies that maybe don’t bring as much public attention, and don’t get people as excited about doing things in their yard for them. So I think this is a great example. And the monarchs are not a perfect proxy for all other butterflies and insects, but I think they are one that people get excited about.
And then we get to start to have that conversation that monarchs are in trouble, and so are many other animals, including many other Western butterflies, and some of them are in even worse shape than monarchs, but monarchs are certainly not in a good state. So anything we can do for them can also benefit these other animals by planting native milkweed, by planting native flowers, by reducing your reliance on pesticides, by trying to support farmers that provide wildlife habitat, or maybe reduce their reliance on pesticides. And that we can all play a role in helping butterflies and other insects by making changes on behalf of monarchs.
Miller: So to go back to the news last week, that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed monarch butterflies in North America as being endangered, how much attention would federal agency heads pay to a decision like that by an independent international organization?
Pelton: I mean they are really separate processes. On paper, there’s no relation. But I think in reality, this is confirmation with what the service found themselves, which is that the monarch is in trouble. And so I think that, hopefully, this will sway decision makers who are thinking about this, and are thinking about the public’s understanding of this issue. And hopefully this does add another checkbox in the column of “we need to get protections for these animals, we need to do work on the ground to support them.”
Miller: So let’s move back to this question of just how widespread monarch butterflies are, and your suggestion that that actually could be one of the reasons that US Fish and Wildlife has been delaying this. Because if these butterflies are everywhere, unlike, say, a spotted owl or the bumblebee that you mentioned, it does seem like it complicates, to a great extent, what new regulations might mean, what they would be. What are some potential activities that would be curtailed or regulated in different ways? I guess this is all the realm of conjecture, but things that you think are likely if and when monarchs are actually federally listed?
Pelton: Yeah. Again, this is conjecture, because I’m not with the Service. And monarchs, if they are listed, depending on how they’re listed, the service could have a lot of flexibility in how they decide to create rules. So people get really excited, I’m getting into the weeds here, with critical habitat, which is actually habitat that we see is critical to this animal’s survival. And so there’s a lot of restrictions when something’s designated as critical habitat. And so I think there’s definitely some groups, certain groups that really don’t want to see them monarch listed, and will raise that fear in the public. “You’re not going to be able to mow your lawn, you’re not gonna be able to farm your fields.”
If you strip that away and think about the power of environmental laws in this country, which the Endangered Species Act is an example of a really powerful law, that’s not going to happen. That’s not realistic. There’s just no way that the Fish and Wildlife Service has that sort of power. So they’re going to do something more narrow. And so I think trying to not let people put that runaway fear, because that’s really just not realistic. I think it’s being used as a tool to scare people or be against listing. And there’s just no way that that’s how they would apply it.
We’ve seen it with other animals, where they can create a very narrow band, “here’s the areas that we think are the most important for this animal, let’s do good work there, and then let’s create guidelines and flexibility that meet people where they’re at.” Maybe we create incentives so that private landowners want to restore, protect habitat, they have financial resources, they have technical resources to do that. That’s a lot of the work we’re doing. Other groups, like the US Fish and Wildlife Service Partner Program, NRCs, a lot of people are already there ready to provide that support, and there will be more incentives. More carrots instead of sticks. We get kind of worked up about the sticks, but often listing opens the door for people that want to do good things for wildlife to have the resources to do those good things for wildlife.
And then how they’ll create some restrictions for certain things, I hope they will. I hope there will be some curtailing. Personally, the overwintering sites, which are these little groves of trees in California up and down the coast, I’d like to see those protected. I get so sick to my stomach when I hear that another one got cut down because somebody didn’t know it had value. So I think that that would be really low hanging group for the service to make a big impact for this animal, and only affect a really small section of land and a really small number of landowners.
Miller: We got an email this weekend from a man named Chris Carvallo who wrote about what individuals can do. He noted that showy milkweed is often suggested to provide food and habitat for monarchs, and then he wrote this: “From personal experience, I can tell you that this must be done with great care in urban and suburban settings. The plant spreads by long underground roots, and will seek water anywhere near it. I planted it, and had it invading lawns, flowerbeds, even popping up in sidewalk cracks 10 or more feet away from the original plants. Good alternatives for residential gardens are butterfly flower, and narrow leaf milkweed.” What do you recommend that people do if they want to help butterflies as individuals?
Pelton: I love having these conversations with people, and I think I can back up at least part of that person’s experience, which is I have showy milkweed in my yard, and the place where I planted it, and it’s been showing up for the last three years. This year, I was like “where is it? It’s not coming up.” I had a late show up, and it had moved like three or four feet, because it has rhizomes.
So it can spread. It’s not invasive or spreading in the way that we think of, it’s not gonna make large leaps because it is just spreading underground. So if you don’t want to put it in a place if you have a very narrow spot for it, and that’s the only place you want it to be, showy milkweed is probably not your plant of choice. For me, it’s kind of spreading throughout this zone that I created to be a pollinator garden, so I’m really happy, and that’s actually a win for me. It’s doing the work for me.
But narrow leaf milkweed is a great choice. It’s native to, don’t quote me on it, but pretty much all of Oregon, besides like the Cascades and coast range. It tends to not spread as much. It’s a more delicate plant, it’s just not as big, so it’s probably easier for smaller spaces.
And then the butterfly weed that they mentioned, that’s an attractive one. It’s not technically native. If you really want to have a native plant garden, that’s not your best choice. But it is otherwise a really attractive plant that monarchs will use.
And besides milkweed, if you don’t want to have milkweed, there are so many other plants you can plant that support monarchs and other butterflies, and are host plants to other butterflies. And that includes a wide range of native plants, some non-native plants. And you can just try to do things that you know provide good support to wildlife, and that you like. So you don’t have to be a purist. I know I love lavender, and I know that honey bees and bumblebees love lavender, and I’ve got lavender in my garden. And that’s not necessarily going to support anyone that wants to do an all native garden. But that’s like a win-win for me, that it supports pollinators, and I enjoy that plant.
Miller: Is there science to give us a sense for the difference that these small scale plantings in people’s yards, that they’re doing just as individuals, the difference that these plantings make as opposed to the kinds of systemic changes that we spent the bulk of our conversation talking about?
Pelton: I think it’s one of those cases of yes, and. These small habitat patches, because insects are mobile, because monarchs are so mobile, they really do matter. And I can say when I lived in the midwest, I had a single milkweed plant, a swamp milkweed plant growing through a crack in my driveway. And monarchs visited it, and I had a caterpillar, and it was an incredible experience of creating habitat in the middle of my driveway unintentionally. So I think in that way, if you build it they will come is very true for insects. It’s a very powerful message because no matter where you live, even if you live in an apartment with a balcony and you can put something out on your balcony, you can provide habitat.
And on the other hand, how does that rank compared to the systemic needs? And I think this is where, to be the bearer of bad news, we really can’t do it alone as individuals. We need that systemic change. A great example is tackling climate change, tackling plastics pollution. We all want to do our part. But as individuals, we can’t make those massive policy changes. So we need to work on both fronts. And that’s where I think something like getting the monarch listed federally would allow us to do those systemic changes that we really need to see, while supporting all these individuals who are already on board and are already excited about monarchs.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
