I tabled at the Minneapolis Monarch Festival a few weeks ago, wearing my Neighborhood Greening hat. Colleagues and I erected a bullpen of open-sided tents staffed with volunteer-friends from a wide range of organizations. Our collective theme was how to use native plants to build biodiversity in our yards and communities. Not just for the benefit of monarchs, but for birds, insects, and a range of other wildlife as well.
Anticipating the enthusiasm of the festivalgoers who perennially arrive bursting with questions and eager to share monarch stories, we volunteers carted and wheeled in a universe of resources and educational materials and tried hard to be good listeners. After seven talkative hours, my colleagues and I agreed we were drained—yet full—at the end of the day.
Drenched in song, food, dance, and a sea of volunteer, non-profit, and vendor tents, this multicultural event is always a thrill. The lively festival celebrates the annual mind-bending migration of the monarch butterfly. From where I live in Minnesota (which is a warm-season Midwestern host to the migrating monarch population east of the Rocky Mountains) monarchs arrive and then reproduce from about mid-May to the beginning of September.
At summer’s end, the delicate piece of artwork that is the monarch leaves us behind and navigates nearly 2,500 miles of air currents and thermals to overwinter in the endangered high altitude oyamel fir forest sanctuaries of Mexico. Monarchs migrating from parts of Canada can journey up to 3,000 miles. Come early spring in Mexico, the monarch phenomenon begins anew. Unlike the journey south, the journey north takes several generations of monarchs to complete. Milkweed (the only plant monarch caterpillars will eat) in my neck of the woods don’t start to peek above soil until sometime in May—just in time to receive the first wave of tattered monarchs that breeze into town and lay eggs on these tiny early-season milkweed.
The festivalgoers know the troubling monarch story well: The monarch population is tanking and this magical butterfly probably won’t be dancing around most of our U.S. landscapes in the not-too-distant future. Beyond this annual event, I am always surprised by the conversations I have with people who have no idea that milkweed is the exclusive host plant of the monarch—i.e., no milkweeds, no monarchs—and that the paucity of milkweed is one of the (many) reasons the monarch population has been steadily falling over the past few decades. I naively believe people are quite aware of the dwindling U.S. monarch populations*. But, in my experience they aren’t aware, despite the “plight of the monarch” story repeatedly popping up in the national news. And despite the word “iconic” being the well-worn word used to describe this insect. Perhaps it’s iconic, but it seems so many don’t know much about the monarch other than how lovely it is. Or much about the plight of insects, in general. (Note: they’re leaving us.)
There’s one thing about this special festival that gnaws at me, though. It’s listening to the enthusiastic stories of those who rear hundreds of monarchs in captivity. It’s not a practice encouraged by any of the educators and experts at the festival. But it is something many of the well-meaning festivalgoers do. Rearing multitudes of monarchs in captivity offers the keeper of the monarchs both the repeated thrill of witnessing magical metamorphoses, and a sense of doing something important that will help save this intriguing black and orange butterfly.
Raising hundreds of monarchs in captivity keeps hands full from May to September. It’s a project that will keep a kid out of school for the summer very busy. And, apparently, it does. Because every year I hear from a lot of excited kids who proudly tell their stories of massive quantities raised—100, 200, 300 and counting—with beaming parents listening in. I can’t bring myself to tell these young people that they’re probably not really helping the monarch. Heck, I can’t even tell the adults—many of whom also tell their own stories of rearing monarchs in the hundreds. Like a good coward, I try to shift the conversation to the importance of creating habitat in which living things can naturally live, eat, grow, and even be predated. Outside.
If I engage in conversations about monarch rearing outside the festival, when it feels appropriate, I share what emerging research informs us about the unintended consequences of good intentions of rearing monarchs in captivity. But the feel-good act of raising large quantities of monarchs often triggers a defensiveness that shuts these conversations down. If I can work in a suggestion about learning more and checking out the research for one’s self, I do. But these conversations aren’t my idea of fun.
I’m guilty myself of having raised monarchs in my living room years ago. No more than 20 over the course of a season. Not because I was being cautious, but because that’s really all I could manage. I had a hard time keeping up with cage cleaning, milkweed leaf cleansing, egg hunting, the timing of the release of eclosed (emerged) butterflies. And I could never leave town without a monarch-sitter because of the daily requirements of monarch rearing. But when I learned that rearing under artificial conditions could harm monarchs, I quit cold turkey and let monarchs do their thing naturally in my native plant garden.
The perils to captive raised monarchs are many. While responsibly raising a very small number of wild-collected monarch eggs for school educational purposes receives a nod of approval from experts, captive rearing in large quantities can range from unhelpful to damaging. By default, those who rear monarchs do so in unnatural surroundings. “Monarchs did not evolve under high density conditions, and thus caterpillars reared in close proximity to one another are highly susceptible to disease transmission….If unhealthier monarchs survive rearing and are released into the wild, they could transmit diseases or parasites to wild monarchs,” states Monarch Joint Venture.
Recent research studies indicate that monarchs raised in captivity are less likely to reach Mexico than wild monarchs. By enabling the marginally fit or unfit to survive through captive rearing, those monarchs that would not have made it in natural conditions are now out and about spreading their less fit genes to an already struggling population. Not lastly, but I’ll stop here: Home rearing also complicates research. Movement patterns, sightings, and habitat usage confound research findings if it is not known whether a particular data point represents a wild monarch’s behavior versus one that was just released from one’s backyard.
A few years ago articles started circulating with titles such as Monarchs Raised in Captivity Don’t Migrate. These articles hooked their wagons to a research study that, presumably, showed that monarchs raised in artificial conditions were directionally challenged—heading off in random directions immediately after eclosing, rather than south, during migration season. A later study then indicated that, if given time to orient to outdoor conditions, monarchs (fitted with tiny radio transmitters!) did manage to orient south during migration. But, citizen science efforts that entail the placement of tiny stickers tagged with important identifying data on monarch wings offer the final word on this discussion. According to the non-profit organization, Monarch Watch, the tagged wings collected from the forest floor from butterflies that make it to Mexican oyamel fir forests and then naturally die, reveal that the overall recovery rate for wild caught monarchs that migrate successfully is nearly twice as high as for reared populations.
Our personal forays into the natural world, even with the best of intentions, are fraught with consequences. Installing bee hotels for native bees, hobby beekeeping, home monarch rearing, hanging bird feeders in our yards, gardening with irreplaceable peat moss, injecting treatments that save the tree but may harm the leaf-eating or nectar-sipping insect, creating “bee lawns” comprised of Dutch white clover or other potentially invasive species, and a universe more, are all actions that can evoke a cacophony of heated conversation between those who do or buy with good intentions and those who maintain those intentions can lead to poor environmental outcomes.
The solution? Act with informed care for the thing you are trying to nurture. And, act with equal informed care to ensure actions do not inflict collateral damage to other living things or ecosystems in order to avoid the unintended consequences of good intentions.
*There are several monarch populations in the U.S. The Western population over winters along the California coast and Baja, Mexico. The Eastern population east of the Rocky Mountains over winters in Mexican oyamel fir forests. Both populations have plummeted in the last few decades. Florida is home to a nonmigratory population of monarchs.
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Thank you Leslie, for a very helpful article. I agree with both you and Vicki - Monarchs need help, and the best ways to help are to protect native habitat in the wild, and to plant natives in yards. Native plants are the foundation of so many complex food webs - they support Monarchs, but also the myriad of other bugs and birds and animals that make up our world. Raising hundreds of Monarchs in captivity may feel good, but it's better for the Monarchs - and all the other creatures - to have more native habitat so they can live out their lives in the wild.
Thanks! A conversation that has to be had more frequently these days. As a monarch festival exhibitor alongside Leslie, I concur on the continuing rise of well-meaning people home rearing monarchs and large numbers at that. Raising a few, under the conditions as given in the Monarch Watch link, may be inspirational and informative, helping one become more knowledgeable about monarch biology and their unique needs. But as Leslie wrote, to impact a positive future for the monarchs, creating and advocating more native plant habitat, is absolutely essential. Growing milkweed and nectar plants in one own yards is the best - up close to nature and providing a place for monarchs plus many other beneficial species to thrive is gratifying. In fact it's awesome. Monarchs are what conservation biologists call a flagship species, take care of them with habitat, a myriad of other creatures benefit too. The monarch link to milkweed is more common knowledge these days than 15 years ago when I first became involved in Grow Monarch Habitat projects. People who rear monarchs have to supply this essential caterpillar food. Yet, too often they opt for the easier to grow non-native tropical milkweed and that is another concern. Monarch Joint Venture has a number of fliers related to these topics too.