Nate Rott
Appearances
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
One of my dog's 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 in 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.
Short Wave
The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
Right. Through all of these like really creative approaches. Right.
Short Wave
The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
Short Wave
The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
Pun excused. And we look at the challenge of protecting a species that's habitat could be your backyard.
Short Wave
The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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 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, but
Short Wave
The Battle To Save Monarch 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?
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
So this is Karen Sinclair, by the way. Whoa, so they're just low-grade poisoning themselves to not taste good?
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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%.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
Emily, do we know anything about anything? True. True.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
And that 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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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 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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
And remember, this is a species that migrates through nearly every state in a country where most of the land is privately owned.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
And most of this, remember, is going to take place under a new presidential administration.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
And so what she's referring to there are these rules that the Trump administration passed making it 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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
Right. 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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
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.
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The Battle To Save Monarch Butterflies
Me too. I will be reading with great interest and earnest.