Anurag Agrawal, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, gave a talk about monarch butterflies and the ecological disasters that they highlight in the University of Connecticut’s Dodd Center for Human Rights on Thursday, Oct. 16. This is the second Teale Lecture — a series of talks on environmental studies, advocacy and justice — of this year.
UConn ecology and evolutionary biology professor David Wagner introduced the audience to Agrawal. Wagner said that Agrawal has written 330 papers and books so far and has been cited over 40,000 times. Agrawal wishes to study and combat “existential climate crises,” according to Wagner.
Agrawal began his talk by reassuring the audience that he wasn’t going to share a lot of data in the lecture and would instead tell a narrative based on his research.
He then started discussing the subject of the presentation: monarch butterflies, which he calls, “the Bambi of the insect world.” He then talked about the life cycles of butterflies, saying many of them undergo metamorphosis. In metamorphosis, the creatures gain increased mobility in the butterfly stage, as opposed to the worm-like movement of the caterpillar stage.
Agrawal shared the fact that monarch butterflies are the weight of a paperclip each and how every year, they migrate by flying over a stretch of land approximately 4,000 miles ideally to Mexico (but sometimes accidentally reach other parts of Latin America and Florida), where their arrival typically coincides with the start of the local holiday Día de los Muertos. Monarchs don’t typically like to fly over bodies of water, so they get stuck on the coastlines while seeking warmth.
Agrawal then shifted the focus to all insects as well as other invertebrates, who he claims are better stewards of the land than most humans. Agrawal said insects provide a critical service for those higher up on the food chain in combination with their consumption of decomposed matter. Instead, however, most people focus on megafauna over insects and invertebrates, due to aesthetic appeal. Despite the intrigue of megafauna, Agrawal and Wagner both research the declines of insects.
Stressing the importance of remembering that the monarchs are only one species of butterfly and how there are so many other species out there, Agrawal said they’ve taught him a lot and many others about ecological conservation, saying that “There is no possibility of monarch butterflies going extinct.” Although the monarchs have overall declined in population and the numbers fluctuate a lot over the course of a year, the population ultimately stabilizes to a number still enabling survival.
One such effort to document the population and migration patterns of the monarch butterflies was done by community scientists as far back as the 1940s. According to Agrawal, scientists would put stickers on monarch wings instructing people who see them to mail the specimens to the Royal Ontario Museum. Agrawal said the monarchs have since colonized Hawaii, Spain, Northwest Africa, Australia and some Pacific Islands.
The other subject of the lecture by proxy is the common milkweed plant, which are eaten by butterflies and are the monarchs’ only food source.
Agrawal stressed that the monarch butterfly isn’t a primary pollinator of the common milkweed and that they typically do a terrible job in helping milkweeds reproduce, since the butterflies don’t go into the plants’ pollen packages. Despite this, Agrawal said the caterpillars go through the trouble of cutting off the protective hairs from the leaves and chewing after clearing. Agrawal also said that 8 to 10% of the milkweeds have latex in them, which he called a “very effective plant defense” that caterpillars could get stuck in while trying to get a meal, ultimately killing them. Agrawal then said that 13% of caterpillars die on their first day of life.
Agrawal then shared a list of lessons he’s learned. The first lesson was, “We do not fully understand the importance of the disjunction (butterfly loss) between northern breeding regions and overwintering.” He showed pictures of dead monarchs on the sides of highways and roads.
He also said that “Planting native milkweeds will not hurt, but it will not solve the [ecological] problem.” Agrawal then reassessed the place of monarch butterflies in the conservation movement, saying that from a scientific model, they don’t represent the movement well; but for a public audience who aren’t familiar with ecology, they work as a promotional beacon.
Jensen O’Meara, a first-year graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, said, “It was very interesting. The slides are easy to understand for people who aren’t experts in monarchs like me.”
Their main takeaway from the talk was how “monarchs have become the Bambi of insects and people are paying attention to their migratory cycle” as well as general nature conservation efforts. They followed that up with, “A lot of people think [monarch butterflies] are beautiful.”