The survival of monarchs hinges on cross-border collaboration and the voices of local communities.
You might not be aware of a little knight getting ready for its first flight of survival in your kitchen garden. A small caterpillar might have slipped from an egg, feeding off your plant leaves. The said caterpillar peels itself several times to form a cocoon. From this tiny cocoon slips a butterfly with six legs and four large orange fragile wings once the blood starts to circulate in the wings only then the monarch butterfly is ready to fly from your garden to start a journey of 3000 miles.
These little insects with scaled wings are native to the United States and Canada. Each year in late summer millions of monarchs with wings like paper and a body weight of a hundredth of an ounce from the U.S. and Canada undertake a journey of thousands of miles to locate a warm, safe place where they can spend winters and produce offspring. To reach their haven in the volcanic mountains of Sierra Nevada, Mexic0 monarchs travel across mountains, and oceans and face harsh wind, thunderstorms and rains.
The journey is not only long but mysterious. In a year a total of four generations of monarch butterflies emerge. The first three generations with a life expectancy of five to six weeks move bit by bit from Mexico to Canada and the last generation covers an entire journey of thousands of miles from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico which takes about one to two months, after which they remain there for another six months. The mystery is why the fourth generation doesn’t take the journey in stages as other generations do in their flight from Mexico to the U.S. or Canada. Scientists have attempted to explain the extended life span of the fourth generation by a related hormone deficiency as well as a lack of food during the autumn. This deficit of hormones and food is believed to prohibit sex organs from fully forming resulting in a lack of sexual activity within the population by skipping the breeding process; the excess energy is instead solely to help overcome the great distance.
Dr. Fred Urquhart, an Ontario biologist, started collecting data about monarchs with the help of a man named Kenneth C. Brugger. In February 1973, the search for monarchs began, who disappear each year as autumn approaches. Finally, on the evening of Jan. 9, 1975, Brugger informed the University of Toronto, where Urquhart worked, in his shaky excited voice that he had located the colony in the mountains of Sierra Nevada, Mexic0. After this astonishing discovery, scientists finally understood the life cycle of these little winged insects. The Mexican government declared the mountains of Sierra Nevada a conservation area.
More and more research started about monarchs and they were officially declared endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Jul. 21, 2022. 2023-2024 is declared to be the second worst year for butterflies in central Mexico since monitoring began in 1993. The monarch population has suffered a downfall of 95% of what it was in the 1980s. The devastating decline is induced by many factors like extreme hot and cold weather under climate change, the lack of milkweed which the monarch caterpillar feeds on, the use of pesticides and habitat loss from deforestation and urbanization, but the most interesting factor is conservation policies. Many lands have been converted to conservation areas and the people who lived sustainably with monarchs have been evacuated from these areas making monarchs lose the agricultural support they had with them. Conversion of Point Pelee National Park, Canada was host to monarchs for fall migration to woods which were not suitable for them hence making them leave their ancestral lands. Different environmental laws and regulations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico play a significant role in the loss of their population. They are protected in Mexico's wintering habitats, but their migratory path lacks unified conservation. Canada lists them as endangered, but protections vary, while they remain unlisted in the U.S. Political and economic factors often influence these policies, allowing activities like butterfly rearing in the U.S. but not in Ontario.
The best approach to conservation is to promote public participation. They can help not only in collecting data about monarchs, such as through the Monarch Watch Tagging Program but also in restoring and increasing monarch habitats if they are trained and equipped with the right knowledge. The Raise, Tag and Release Summer Program is another step towards conservation in which these citizen scientists not only plant’s milkweed garden but take it a step further to raise monarchs by themselves and when they hatch they tag and release them in the open sky. Policymakers from all three nations must collaborate to establish a unified conservation strategy, prioritizing the involvement of indigenous communities and citizen scientists. This inclusive approach will pave the way for a more holistic and effective conservation effort for monarch butterflies.
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