Monarch but­ter­fly migra­tion map

Almost any­one can iden­tify a monarch but­ter­fly, even if they didn’t pay atten­tion in biol­ogy class. They are part of nor­mal life. But how many peo­ple know they are endangered?

Com­mon as milk­weeds, we all notice them, and take as a fact of life that mon­archs will show up every sum­mer. Yet, there is more to this com­mon insect than meets the eye, plus a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion when you want to know more.

The ques­tions add up fast. These crea­tures, weigh­ing less than an ounce, may migrate 1500 miles back and forth every year to their over-wintering site. That’s 25–30 miles per day. Why do they go through all that trou­ble? And how do they know the way, when it’s the 3rd or 4th gen­er­a­tion that makes the trip back to south­ern Mex­ico after the sum­mer breed­ing sea­son in North America.

The monarch life cycle is so com­plex and almost unbe­liev­able, that few peo­ple under­stand how to explain it, but that’s exactly what we must do. Their fate now rests in how well we humans can com­mu­ni­cate and coop­er­ate with each other to help them. Because due to chang­ing weather pat­terns and habi­tat destruc­tion, the next gen­er­a­tion of humans, or maybe the next one, or the next after that, may never get to see one.

If you really want to know the truth about some­thing, you’d go to some­one who has spent their life study­ing it. For mon­archs, that’s Dr Chip Tay­lor, founder of Monarch Watch, a monarch but­ter­fly research and infor­ma­tion cen­ter that employes thou­sands of school kids every year to help track the num­bers and their migrations.

Monarch Watch, based in Lawrence, Kansas, in the mid­dle of it all, has evolved dif­fer­ent maps of Monarch migra­tion pat­terns over the years. When I first designed a map for the National Park Ser­vice book, <i>Frequently Asked Ques­tions about Butterflies</i>, a few years ago, they had it down to two black and white maps–one for spring and one for fall. I was sure that the data could be com­bined into one map and also made eas­ier to under­stand for the grade-school butterfly-banders and almost any non-scientist.

In the Spring of 2010, after a dis­as­trous win­ter freeze in the monarch over-wintering grounds in the south­ern Mex­ico, Dr. Tay­lor called on me to redesign that map from the NPS book for a poster that they could dis­trib­ute. The map still wasn’t quite right to him. We sent proofs back and forth for weeks before he was sat­is­fied that it was as cor­rect as possible.

That’s how sci­ence works–you never assume you know the whole story, and you will always be get­ting closer and closer to the truth, but never arrive.

I was happy to be involved with this project in many ways. I under­stand what’s known about monarch migra­tion now and I’ve helped hun­dreds of oth­ers to do the same.

I’ll never take any­thing in life for granted again, even the small­est. I can’t exactly explain why, but if the mon­archs were gone, part of our col­lec­tive Homo sapi­ens soul would leave with them.

This was a ver­sion of the map I did for a book for the National Park Ser­vice called “Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions about Butterflies.”