The Developing History of Monarch Butterflies

Monarch butterflies are still in the middle of their story – and it’s one that is precarious. Humans are still trying to figure out a lot about them, and aspects of the monarch story have been misrepresented over the years.

Research:

• Monarch Joint Venture: https://monarchjointventure.org/
• “Monarch Butterfly.” The National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Invertebrates/Monarch-Butterfly
• Sutherland, Douglas W.S. and Jean Adams, ed. “The Monarch Butterfly – Our National Insect.” Part of “Insect Potpourri: Adventures in Entomology.” CRC Press. 1992.
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Danaus". Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Feb. 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Danaus-Greek-mythology
• Kathleen S. Murphy. “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4, 2013, pp. 637–70. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0637
• Müller-Wille, Staffan. "Carolus Linnaeus". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 May. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carolus-Linnaeus
• Stearns, Raymond Phineas. “James Petiver: Promoter of Natural Science, c.1663-1718.” American Antiquarian Society. October 1952. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807240.pdf
• “Mark Catesby (1683 – 1749).” Catesby Commemorative Trust. 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20130906122250/http://www.catesbytrust.org/mark-catesby/
• Smith-Rogers, Sheryl. “Maiden of the Monarchs.” TEXAS PARKS & WILDLIFE. March 2016. https://monarchjointventure.org/images/uploads/documents/legacy_monarch_catalina_trail_article.pdf
• Scott, Alec. “Where do you go, my lovelies?” University of Toronto Magazine. Aug. 24, 2015. https://magazine.utoronto.ca/campus/history/where-do-you-go-my-lovelies-norah-and-fred-urquhart-monarch-butterfly-migration/
• Hannibal, Mary Ellen. “How you can help save the monarch butterfly -- and the planet.” TEDTalk. April 28, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJTbegktKc
• Jarvis CE, Oswald PH. The collecting activities of James Cuninghame FRS on the voyage of Tuscan to China (Amoy) between 1697 and 1699. Notes Rec R Soc Lond. 2015 Jun 20;69(2):135–53. doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2014.0043.
• “The US Endangered Species Act.” World Wildlife Federation. https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/the-us-endangered-species-act#:~:text=Passed%20with%20bipartisan%20support%20in,a%20species%20should%20be%20protected.
• Associated Press. “Beloved monarch butterflies are now listed as endangered.” WBEZ Chicago. July 23, 2022. https://www.wbez.org/stories/beloved-monarch-butterflies-are-now-listed-as-endangered/0f3cf69b-8376-42eb-af0a-9e8b8b4ab6b3
• Garland, Mark S., and Andrew K. Davis. “An Examination of Monarch Butterfly (Danaus Plexippus) Autumn Migration in Coastal Virginia.” The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 147, no. 1, 2002, pp. 170–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3083045
• “Natural History – Monarch Butterfly.” Center for Biological Diversity. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/invertebrates/monarch_butterfly/natural_history.html
• Catesby, Mark. “A Monarch butterfly, with orchids.” C. 1722-6. Royal Collection Trust. https://www.rct.uk/collection/926050/a-monarch-butterfly-with-orchids
• Daly, Natasha. “Monarch butterflies are now an endangered species.” July 21, 2022. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/monarch-butterflies-are-now-an-endangered-species
• Walker, A., Oberhauser, K.S., Pelton, E.M., Pleasants, J.M. & Thogmartin, W.E. 2022. Danaus plexippus ssp. plexippus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2022: e.T194052138A200522253. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T194052138A200522253.en
• Price, Michael. “Monarch miscalculation: Has a scientific error ab

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I
know I have told this story on the show before.
I think it was on a behind the scenes that

(00:21):
when I was a kid, I used to write pamphlets
about science and nature and leave them around the house
because I thought my family needed to be educated. Those
are all sourced from our nineteen seventy six editions of
the world book Encyclopedia Um. Listen. We could talk about
what a conceited little child I was, but that's a

(00:44):
different story. But I will tell you that butterflies got
a lot of coverage in those missives. It was actually
one of the few topics that got multiple pamphlets written
about them. It was pretty much like butterflies, fox Is
and astronomy, where the big repeat items. But most of
the time it was just a little and when I

(01:06):
say pamphlets, I mean like a little two pages stapled
and folded together and everything written in pencil. Like I
really thought my family was going to study this ridiculous
business written by like a snooty seven year old but
in any case, monarchs were a very big favorite, like
they are for many many kids. We talked about that
a little bit on the behind the scenes as well.

(01:28):
We are still those sitting sort of smack dab in
the middle of the history of monarchs as we know it,
and the next chapter of that history is really going
to be up to humans. So I thought we would
talk today about what we know about these very beautiful
and flashy insects that are also common enough that most
of us have familiarity with them if we grew up
in North America. Talk about how we came to know,

(01:48):
what we do know about them, and what we're still
trying to figure out, as well as what parts of
the story have kind of been misrepresented over the years.
So the monarch butterfly is probably the most widely recognized
butterfly in the world. I would say definitely in the US.
Just hearing the common name, most people can immediately picture it.
And just in case you can't, this species has bright

(02:11):
orange wings with black veins and black borders. Those butterflies
scientific name is then OUs plexipus. It's a milkweed butterfly,
meaning that it's in the subfamily dana a within the
family Nymphalidae. We'll talk a little bit about that nomenclature
in a little bit, but we mentioned milkweat there, and

(02:32):
that's the primary diet of monarch butterflies, which is unique
because milkwheat is toxic. It's just about everything else, including humans,
And that's kind of how monarchs have survived so well
for so long. They really don't have competition for food source.
But it also has made them very welcome visitors for
people who keep livestock. For example, because milkweed is poisonous

(02:53):
to other animals, a healthy monarch population that can keep
the plants growth in check reduces dangers to grazing herds.
When we say poisonous, it's probably not going to kill
any other animal, but it will make them very ill.
Adult monarchs will also feed on other flowering plants as
well as milkweed. Monarchs lay their eggs on the milkweed,

(03:14):
and then those eggs hatch and the caterpillars are sitting
right on their food. They eat their little egg first,
and then they only eat the milkweed. They retain that
plant's toxin in their bodies. This makes the caterpillars toxic
to predators, although through the glycosides that they addressed, and
this toxicity stays with the monarch through the pupa stage

(03:34):
and into adulthood. So this probably won't kill a bird,
but we'll make it sick if the bird eats the monarch.
So most birds learn pretty quickly not to mess with them.
And we mentioned the egg and caterpillar stages of the
monarch's life cycle, but here's a little bit more detail.
While the courtship between male and female butterflies of this
species happens largely in the air, the actual meeting and

(03:56):
fertilization happens in what's often called ground phase, and then
the females head to their breeding ground, which sometimes requires migration,
something we're going to talk about a lot more throughout
this episode. And then they lay their eggs. As we
said on milkweed plants, a single female can lay as
many as three hundred to five hundred eggs over the
course of several weeks. And when the caterpillars hatch, as

(04:19):
Tracy said, they start to munch. And the caterpillars of
monarchs are black, yellow and white stripe. They're even pretty
interesting looking. In that stage, it takes about two weeks
for monarchs to go through their egg and larva stages.
Once they've reached full size as a caterpillar, loaded up
with all those glycosides from their food source, they enter
the pupa stage. Pupation is when the monarch caterpillar forms

(04:42):
a case around its body, known as a chrysalist. Normally
this hangs from the underside of the milkweed leaf inside
the crysalis. Over period of nine to fifteen days, metamorphosis
takes place. The insects wings grow in and its body
changes shape. Once it emerges from the crysalist at changes
even more as the wings attain their full stretch in

(05:03):
the body elongates. Yeah. I have also seen some research
that said that the milkweed is not really where they're
gonna do their their pupa stage. I have read sources
that say both. So just f y I have that
rang oddly to you. Uh. The life span of monarchs varies,
and that is actually connected to their migration cycle. Most

(05:25):
generations of monarchs live for a few weeks. You'll sometimes
listed as a month. Uh, You'll sometimes see it as
six weeks. But the generation that hatches late in the
summer is destined for the fall migration south for winter,
and there's a cool mechanism in place to enable them
to live long enough to make that trip, which is
that they have a delay in their sexual maturation. While

(05:48):
normally a monarch butterflies life would be all about finding
a mate once it matures and then laying eggs, completing
its life mission, the pre autumn group doesn't normally mate
until after they have over winter in the reproduction cycle
begins in March, so they can live as long as
eight months. Monarch butterflies are generally considered to be native

(06:09):
to North and South America, Although the population in South
America is now quite small, they can be found in
small numbers and several other places. Hawaii, Spain, and Australia
all have their own monarch populations, but North America is
really their primary location. Yeah. You will also see a
lot of different information about how they got to places

(06:31):
like Hawaii, Spain, and Australia, whether those were brought there
by people, or whether they migrated there themselves, or whether
they got there through some other means of naturally being
there for maybe much longer than we know. What we
do know is that they don't migrate in any of
those other places only in North America. So there are

(06:51):
two recognized populations of monarch butterflies in North America. The
western breeding group consists of the butterflies that are west
of the Rocky Mountain. The Eastern group lives and breeds
primarily in Canada and the Great Plains, as well as
areas farther to the east. And perhaps the most unique
characteristic of monarch butterflies is the fact that they do migrate.

(07:13):
The western monarchs typically over winter in southern California, in
the eastern group migrates to central Mexico for winter. It
takes generations to make the full cycle of their journey.
The migration southward typically happens in one generation, and then
the northward migration happens in two to four, depending on
how far north they travel. After each generation lays eggs,

(07:37):
they die, and the resulting offspring continue on with the track. This,
of course, follows a route that shifts with temperatures. What's
really odd and marvelous is that the generation that makes
it to the southernmost destination point always returns to the
same place, a place that that generation has never been
in which it's parents and grandparent generations had also never

(08:01):
been to either, yet they keep returning year after year.
Nobody knows exactly why, although there's a great deal of
study that's gone into attempting to figure it out, and
we will talk about some of that work later on.
Based on fossil record evidence, we know that butterflies have
been around for roughly a hundred and seventy five million years,
but we don't know exactly when humans became consciously aware

(08:24):
of monarch butterflies. The first people to see and recognize
them were, of course, indigenous populations of north, central and
South America, but there's not really a written record of that.
We do know that the oldest specimens that were known
to white Europeans were in the collection of James pett Over,
and that comes with some baggage that we should unpack.

(08:46):
James Pettiver was born in London in sixteen sixty three.
His father died before he was a teenager, and his
maternal grandfather, Richard Elboro, paid for his schooling. In June
of sixteen seventy seven, when he was fourteen, James became
a athecary apprentice under a man named Charles Feldum, who
worked for London's St Bartholomew's Hospital. While completing his apprenticeship

(09:08):
and before becoming an independent apothecary, Pettever joined the Society
of Apothecaries and it was through outings with this group
that he began his first herbarium collection that is now
in London's Natural History Museum. James finished his apprenticeship in
five and opened an apothecary business of his own at
the sign of the White Cross, Aldersgate Street, and that's

(09:30):
where he worked for the rest of his life. And
during that life he became incredibly well known. He was
active in the science community and developed and maintained relationships
with members of the Royal Society as he offered his
expertise on various matters, and his herbarium collection, which grew
to include thousands of samples, was really renowned. While pett

(09:50):
Over collected many samples himself, he gained a lot of
specimens thanks to his relationships with explorers and sailors who
he asked to pick up unique items as traveled around
the world. That's how he came into possession of a
monarch butterfly, which was preserved for him between two sheets
of mica paper. This is noted as having been collected

(10:11):
between six and seventeen o nine in Maryland. Now we're
mentioning all of this because it connects our knowledge of
monarchs in history, as well as other information about the
natural world, to the slave trade. In a paper by
Kathleen S. Murphy published in the William and Mary Quarterly
in October, the author tracked the people that provided pet

(10:34):
overt specimens from the Atlantic basin, and almost half of
them were on ships that traveled slave trade routes, including
the ones that went to Maryland, which is where that
butterfly was found. And we're talking about all of this
because this is a lustrative of how deeply intertwined so
many parts of European and North American history are with
the slave trade, even the parts that don't on their

(10:57):
surface have any obvious connection. In that paper, Murphy makes
the point that all of the people that pett Over
worked with were ships surgeons or captains, so they were
men of rank who were actively engaged in slavery. No
one in this transaction could really claim ignorance. So while
the collections and publications of pett Over helped advanced Europe's

(11:18):
knowledge of the natural world and of monarch butterflies. That
knowledge came at a price that's really not acknowledged. Most
of the time, we'll talk about mentions of monarch butterflies
that came after pett Over, after we pause for a
sponsor break. After pett Over specimen. The next significant example

(11:45):
we have of a monarch butterfly in the historical record
is the illustration work of Mark Catesby. Katesby was born
in sixty three in Essex, England, and unlike Petaver, Katesby
made the trip to North America to collect specimens himself
more than once. When his father died in seventeen twelve,
Katesby traveled to live with his sister and her husband

(12:06):
in Virginia, and there he began collecting seeds and specimens
for collectors back home in England, as well as drawing
many of them or painting them so the specimens would
have accompanying illustrations. He stayed in the colonies for seven years,
traveling through the Appalachian Mountains and around the southeast, and
he even went to Jamaica before returning to London in

(12:27):
seventeen nineteen. And when he got back to England, his
work was very well received by the scientific community. At
this point in time. Just for context, Sir Isaac Newton
was chair of the Royal Society, and under the auspices
of the Society, botanist William Sharard led a fundraising effort
to send Katesby back to the colony so he could
do more of this work. The Royal Society was able

(12:50):
to drum up enough sponsors that it could pay for
Mark Katesby's second transatlantic voyage to North America to do
a more comprehensive survey of the continents, flora and fauna.
He sailed in February of seventeen twenty two, and after
three months at sea, made it to the destination of
South Carolina. Over the course of four years, Katesby fulfilled
his mission to document as much of the North American

(13:13):
Southeast natural world as possible. We focused on the Atlantic
coastal low country of South Carolina and Florida, as well
as the Bahamas. After Katesby once again returned to England,
he started compiling his field notes, specimens and illustrations into
a two volume work titled Natural History of Carolina, Florida
and the Bahama Islands. This project took a lot of time.

(13:37):
The first volume published in seventeen twenty nine, the second
not until seventeen forty seven, so it's eighteen years later.
And it is in that second volume of the work,
which is dedicated to Augusta, Princess of Wales, that Katesby's
illustration of the monarch butterfly appears. It's quite beautiful. It
is played eighty eight in the book, and it features

(13:57):
the butterfly along with a dollar orchid and a amshell orchid,
both of which are growing from the trunk of a tree.
By this point, people were already calling the butterfly a monarch.
It's believed that the name was given to the insect
by early English colonists in North America as a nod
to William the third of England, also known as William
of Orange, having been born the Prince of Orange, but

(14:19):
it wasn't yet classified scientifically. That didn't happen until seventeen
fifty eight, when Carl Linnaeus included it in his tenth
edition of systema natural. Linnaeus, who was born in seventeen
oh seven in Small and Sweden, is of course famous
for his classification of binomial nomenclature and due to starting
out without the benefit of a wealthy family to support

(14:42):
his studies. Linnaeus who could easily be a future podcast
subject because I don't think he's shown up on the
show before. Surprisingly now we've mentioned him, but like not
in a bunch of focus. No, he had to take
kind of a slow root in his pursuit of a
career and becoming a published scientific writer. His deep hist
interest was botany. It was something he had loved since

(15:02):
he was young, but he became a medical doctor to
support himself, and it was only after that, after he
became a doctor, that he started to get the backing
to start publishing his system of Nature that started out
with a first volume that was a folio just eleven
pages long. Linnaeus was aided by information like Catesby's illustrations,
and he placed the monarch in his taxonomy, giving it

(15:25):
the genus Papilio and the species plexipus. Linnaeus initially put
all butterflies in the genus Papilio, but that changed over time.
Linnaeus had included subgenuses of which denounce was one, and
that system was then refined by other taxonomists after Lennius died. Today,
the Papilio genus mostly contains swallowtail butterflies, whereas the nounces

(15:50):
its own genus composed of what sometimes called the tiger
butterfly tribe or the tiger butterfly group. You'll also see
the North American monarch specifically referred to as the subspecies
denounced Plexipus plexipus. Yeah, that's just since there are some
that are basically biologically identical, but they appear in other places.

(16:12):
Linnaeus noted in his writing that he had chosen the
names using the sons of the Greek mythological figure Agypdis,
though in Greek legend, Denounced is the brother of Agypdis.
Plexipus was one of a Gypdiss fifty sons, though in
that legend, just to give you context, Denounce had fifty daughters.
In Agypdis force denounced to marry his daughters to Agypticiss

(16:34):
fifty sons, so convenient they had the same number, and
all of the daughters, at their father's instruction, killed their
new husbands on their wedding night. That's, of course, only
one part of the mythology of these people, but carl
Naeus may have been a bit confused on the exact
nature of the story, and in any case, the nomenclature
that he chose for butterflies doesn't seem to reflect any

(16:54):
observations about their behaviors or life cycle. Observing that life
cycle is something that has interested naturalists for centuries now.
In one the over wintering sites of the monarch along
the California coast were identified, but there was still the
eastern group. Nobody was quite sure where they were going
in the winter, at least nobody who didn't live where

(17:17):
they were going. For a long time, the Gulf coast
of Florida was believed to be one possibility, and naturalists
hunted for that spot where the butterflies might be riding
out the winter. Soon, it became apparent that although that
area is warmer than other parts of the US and
the winter, it still can experience frosts, and butterflies can't

(17:38):
survive that kind of temperature drop. So that was finally
ruled out, and this is where Fred and Nora Urkhardt
come into the story. Fred Erkhart had been fascinated by
monarch butterflies since his Toronto, Ontario childhood, and that fascination
had never abated. It actually led him to study biology
at the University of Toronto starting in the ninth thirties,

(18:00):
and then he went on to earn his master's degree
and his PhD in the same field. When he finished
his education, he became the insect collection curator for the
Royal Ontario Museum. During his education, he met Norah Roden,
who was also enrolled in the school, although she was
studying social work. During World War Two, Fred worked in

(18:22):
meteorological service and when that conflict ended, he took a
job at the University of Toronto and he and Nora
were married. In There's was a true partnership. Nora became
as passionate about butterflies as bread was, and one question
really was plaguing them, which was where did these insects
go in the winter? Together they sought out the answer.

(18:46):
It's kind of interesting because they're now pretty well known
for having done this. But uh. In one interview, friend
mentioned that people were like, why are you doing this?
There's no money in this, and he's like, it's making
me crazy not to know. I want to They want
to know. Uh. And one of the first things that
the carts did was to try to find a way

(19:06):
to tag butterflies. This was challenging, as you might expect.
They not only had to come up with something that
would stay in place, but it also couldn't hurt the
butterfly or impede the insectibility to fly. They tried various
paint options and labels which did not work, and then
they came up with a system that finally passed the test.

(19:26):
That test, incidentally involved gently tying the butterflies to the
handlebars of Fred's bike with a fine thread, and then
he would ride and make sure that they could fly
along with him. But that solution was price tag stickers
that were intended for glassware. Because they were light enough
that they didn't make a big difference. Fred and Nora
developed a careful system in which they scraped some of

(19:49):
the scales off of one of the insects wings, and
then they would fold the sticker around the edge of
the wing. The butterflies kept flying as normal, seemingly unbothered.
Every tiny sticker had contact information for the cart's office,
so that anybody who found one of these butterflies, or
even just saw them, might be able to report into

(20:09):
the couple. But this also meant that there needed to
be away to let particularly amateur lepidopters know to even
be looking for butterflies with stickers on them. So the
next step was a print campaign. Nora had the idea
to place ads in newspapers and magazines around the United
States to explain the project and ask citizens science to

(20:31):
help out. You'll sometimes see this as like referenced as
the first big citizen science project. And they got volunteers
through the organization that they established, which was the Insect
Migration Association, to help them tag all of the thousands
of Toronto area butterflies. We'll talk about the response to
those ads after we pause, and here from some of

(20:52):
the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going.
It wasn't long after Nora's ad placements the data and
information started flowing in. Every time someone contacted the carts

(21:13):
to report a sighting of a butterfly, Fred and Nora
noted it on a big map. One theory at the
start of the project was that Eastern monarchs might be
joining the Western group along the California coast. The information
that Fred and Nora collected quickly made it appearent that
wasn't happening. For one thing, there simply were not enough
monarchs in California to make up for the migrating numbers

(21:36):
leaving Southern Canada. In the US, the next step was
to travel to the southern US themselves to see what
they might be able to find out. So they drove
twenty thousand miles as they traveled all around Texas, just
chasing leads and coming up short. Their information. Stopped at
the Mexican border because their ad placements had only been

(21:58):
in US papers. So they did the next logical thing,
which was to put announcements in papers south of the border,
and one of their primary responses came from an American
man named Kenneth Brugger, who wrote, quote, I read with
interest your article on the monarch. It occurred to me
that I might be of some help. Kenneth was an
engineer from Wisconsin working at a textile firm in Mexico City,

(22:22):
and he had seen groups of monarchs in the area
before long. Brogger and a woman who he identified as
Cathy Iguado, and we'll talk about him identifying her as
that in a bit started tracking the insects in their Winnebago.
Brogger and Aguado married in May nineteen seventy four, after
they had started helping the ark Harts, and the two

(22:43):
couples met when Kenneth and Cathy, whose real name is Catalina.
She apparently did not actually like the name Kathy, which
is what her husband called her when they visited Toronto.
After the Broggers returned to Mexico. There was a system.
The Harts would send them tips that they got from
people who had spotted the tagged butterflies, and Kinne than
Catalina would follow up on those sidings and then report back.

(23:07):
They were essentially being the boots on the ground for
the Canadian couple. Often Ken would drive and Catalina would
scan the landscape with binoculars looking for butterflies. At this point,
Ken had retired and they were free to pretty much
spend their time as they wished. Yeah, they had gone
from doing this only on the weekends to this being
basically their full time lives. Um, they did a lot

(23:28):
of it. We're telling a very fast version, but it
took them a long time. Throughout Christmas nineteen seventy four
and into New Year's Day of nineteen seventy five, the
Bruggers had been following monarchs near the mountains in mitchokn
that's about hundred and fifty miles from where Catalina had
grown up. On January second, nineteen seventy five, they hiked

(23:49):
up the mountain known as Sarah Polone, which is an
old volcano, and in that afternoon, after a long day
of hiking in fairly miserable conditions, Catalina looked up and
she yelled back to Ken that she needed a camera
because they had found it a surreal sanctuary, filled with
monarchs everywhere they looked. Catalina later described this moment this

(24:12):
way in an interview quote, neither of us could talk.
I will never get over seeing so many butterflies at
one time. I don't have the words to describe what
I saw. My mind just went blank. Then Ken and
I walked together. We kept whispering, wow, Wow, Wow. We
didn't want to scare the monarchs and their own sanctuary.

(24:32):
The ground was a foot and a half deep with them.
They covered the tree trunks like pages of a book.
We stepped carefully so as not to kill any With
each step, I'd shake my foot back and forth until
I could feel the bare ground. Then we stood in
the middle of a clearing, and as Catalina became still,
the monarchs just started landing right on her. She recounted quote,

(24:55):
I felt their scratchy feet on my face and thought
to myself, Oh, my god, what are we going to
do now? I wish everyone in the world had my
eyes right now to see what I'm seeing and feel
what I'm feeling, because this is so amazing. My god,
you butterflies flew thousands of miles and here you are.
After hurrying back down the trail in the dying light,

(25:17):
Ken called the ark Hearts, and the days that followed,
Catalina and Ken found several more colonies. They told nobody
besides Bread and Nora, for fear that this mountain forest
would then be flushed with humans who would not be
as careful as they were. And the following year, when
it was time for the Monarchs to migrate to Mexico,
the ark Hearts joined Ken and Catalina and Sarah Polone.

(25:41):
They were also accompanied by a National Geographic photographer. In
August of ninety six, the Monarch Migration News was the
cover story for National Geographic. It ran with the title
Discovered the Monarch's Mexican Haven. The cover image is Catalina
covered in monarchs something. It mentions Ken Brugger's dog Coola,

(26:02):
being by his side as he sought out these butterflies.
It casually references his wife, Kathy, who's referred to as
quote a bright and delightful Mexican. It never says that
she is the person in the cover image. It also
doesn't acknowledge that the local population had known that the
monarchs were over wintering there for generations, and most of

(26:24):
those people were like, yes, my grandfather talked about these
all the time. Um and literally, that thing that Tracy
just read about Kathy, as she was called in the article,
is all that she has mentioned. The rite up is
full of quotes from Fred Urkhardt, who did undeniably catalyze
the entire project. He told the magazine quote, those who

(26:45):
have had a dream and have lived to see that
dream come true will have some conception of my feelings
when I first entered the Mexican forest, and there before
my eyes was the realization of a dream that had
haunted me since I was sixteen. After that article published,
Fred and Nora's life was pretty much all about butterfly study.

(27:05):
Fred wrote numerous books and articles about their tracking project
in the ongoing study and discoveries regarding monarchs, and Nora
kept their organization going and managed their business affairs. Catalina
and Ken divorced in the early nineties, and Catalina had
stayed out of the public eye as the ark Hearts
and ken Brugger became known as the team that cracked

(27:26):
the butterfly migration puzzle. But today she's the only surviving
member of the group, and over the years she's come
to be more widely recognized for the part that she
played in this discovery. She consulted on the docu drama
about the monarchs called Flight of the Butterflies that came
out in She advocates for the conservation of monarch habitats

(27:47):
and continues to be on that keep a low profile.
It's clear today that because she was the only Spanish
fluent Mexican born member of the team, it was Catalina
who really enabled the mission and to actually meet its goals,
particularly the segments of her journey with Ken where they
had to negotiate both terrain and the local populations that

(28:09):
he had really no experience with. In an interview that
she gave in twenty Catalina told a journalist quote, I
searched for the monarchs because of the love I have
for all insects and all of nature, for the awe
that they provoked in me in all the beautiful and
ugly ways. I care about the truth and the marvelous
way that nature works in all of us. And then

(28:31):
here's the big reason that Holly wanted to do this episode.
Holly is the one who researched it. In case that
was not obvious, Uh, some of our listeners have probably
guessed it. The monarch butterfly was classified as endangered on
July two, that's about a week before we're recording this
episode and a few weeks before it will come out.

(28:52):
According to information reviewed by the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature or i U see in, in the
last decade, monarch numbers have declined between twenty three and
seventy two. It's a really wide swing, and that's due
to variations in measurement, something that's pretty natural when you're
trying to track an insect by site. The western monarch

(29:13):
population has declined by n nine per cent since the
nineteen eighties, and their eastern counterparts are doing slightly better.
But the numbers are still really grave. Their decline since
the nineteen eighties is eighty percent, so over just four
decades they've gone from thriving to endangered. There are multiple

(29:34):
contributors to these dramatic drops. One of the biggest is
habitat loss. Logging and construction have wiped out forests that
monarchs once visited along your migratory paths. Another is pesticides.
Chemical treatments have not only killed butterflies, but also the
milkweed plants that they need to survive. Climate change is
another threat. During extreme weather events like storms, floods, and drought,

(29:58):
butterflies die in large numbers. The United States has not
yet listed the monarch as an endangered species through the
Endangered Species Act, but many conservation and environmentalist groups across
the country are lobbying for that listing. That listing would
be an important step toward guiding recovery efforts because once
the species is on the list, critical habitat areas become

(30:21):
legally protected. That catalyzes the development of recovery plans as
well as carrying them out. And there is some indication
that numbers might be bolstering a little showing that in
some areas the numbers in the population have gone up
ever so slightly. This is just in the last year,
but it isn't necessarily a sign that things will continue

(30:42):
to get better on their own, but it does offer
some hope that with conservation efforts in place, the population
may continue to rebound. Today we know more than ever
about monarchs, but we also still have a lot of questions.
There have been projects that have involved genetic sequencing of
the speci used to try to more fully understand their
inner compass and their longevity shifts, as well as color differences.

(31:06):
There have also been concerned that some studies of monarch
DNA have accidentally used misidentified butterflies that are not monarchs. Yeah,
there are a lot of butterfly species that kind of
mimic the look of monarchs because it's beneficial to them
to look like a toxic animal um and that there
may have been some confusion in there. Mexico has taken

(31:29):
steps to protect the monarchs over wintering locations in the
country established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, and at the
time of its founding, that reserve consisted of four forests
totaling about sixty two square miles of land, but today
that area has expanded. It's now two hundred seventeen square
miles and most of this land is communally owned by

(31:52):
the communities that live there, and efforts have been made
to help transition the residents of those communities from their
former occupations in fields like logging, which would have been
detrimental to butterflies, two more conservation minded sources of income,
such as bee keeping. There is also a growing eco
tourism economy there. If you live in the US and

(32:12):
you want to learn more about how you can help
monarch populations, you can visit Monarch joint Venture dot org.
It's a partnership of multiple agencies and conservation groups from
across the country. Butterflies, yeah, about which I got very
choked up at the end. Um. I have fun listener
mail though about something that several people have reached out

(32:36):
to me about on Twitter from one of our previous episodes,
and that is Salmon Vertebrae. Oh yeah. This particular email
is from our listener Elizabeth, who writes, Hye, Holly and Tracy,
I love your podcast and my ears perked up at
the mention of Salmon Vertebrae. As beads. This is a
great idea with regard to your concern about smell. I

(32:58):
have some advice. I am an our geologist. I won't
say where Elizabeth works, just to be safe and preserve
her privacy, and my specialty is zoo archaeology. On occasion,
I have to turn an animal carcass into a skeleton
for comparative purposes, so I have some relevant experience. Once
you've cleaned the vertebrae in a very low simmer to

(33:19):
soften and remove any soft bits, soak the vertebrae in
a bath of hydrogen peroxide over the counter stuff is
fine for a few minutes, and then let them dry.
Repeat the peroxide bath until they don't smell. Do not
use bleach that will make the vertebrae brittle over time
and chalky. For your amusement, I enclose a picture of

(33:39):
my cat, Eggs, who is helping me take notes from
my weekly D and D game. Best regards, Elizabeth. Okay,
Eggs is an orange tabby and adorable and I want
to kiss Eggs. Um. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This
is great information. So for any of you that reached
out to me on Twitter about ways that you might
also do a salmon bead project. We'll see if I

(34:01):
get around to it, but I still think it's pretty great. Uh,
then that's how to do it. There have also been
people that have sent me that amazing UM. I didn't
take notes on it for this, but there's an artist
who has done some really beautiful salmon bead garment projects
that are just spectacularly beautiful. So UH, seek those out
because they're worth looking at. Thank you again, Elizabeth. If

(34:22):
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at my heart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History, and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet,
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of

(34:43):
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