This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
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Magnolia Montgomery, age 12, peered into a rectangular enclosure covered with white mesh. Inside are milkweed branches. Caterpillars are slowly crawling on the leaves, some the size of a grain of rice.
“They’re very, very small. And they’re white with black and yellow stripes on them,” she said, examining the caterpillars. “They have two antennas in the front. And kind of two in the back somehow.”
The mesh enclosure is in the greenhouse at Interlochen Center for the Arts, part of the R.B. Annis Botanical Lab and Community Garden. Magnolia was a little hesitant as she searched for the small specks among the leaves, but she was blunt about what she knew.
“I don’t remember many scientific terms for the little baby caterpillars and stuff like that,” she said. But she did remember that the butterflies spend the winter in Mexico, and that males have spots on their wings but the females don’t.
The school’s sustainability department is raising around 50 to 60 monarch butterfly caterpillars — ordered through the University of Kansas as part of an effort to teach summer campers about the insects. For Emily Umbarger, the director of sustainability, this is an important part of raising awareness about the threats monarchs face.
Parasites, climate change, development and pesticide use are among the forces disrupting insect populations around the world.
“In the 1990s when I was a 10 year old, there were monarchs everywhere,” Umbarger said. “Fast forward to today, you know, 34 years later, and the eastern population has decreased by 80 percent and the western population has decreased by more than 95 percent.” (Organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation have pointed to such declines.)
“Monarchs are so driven by temperature, by hours of light in the day, by where their food and their habitat is,” Umbarger said. “If that is not happening where it’s traditionally been happening, that causes a challenge.”
But researchers disagree on exactly what’s happening to monarchs. Some say certain populations are actually doing fine, while others are sounding alarms about declines.
Earlier this year, Yale Environment 360 reported on that tension, pointing to recent studies that cast doubt on conventional knowledge about the monarch population’s trajectory. One, in Current Biology, found that the total population of eastern monarchs has not drastically declined. Those researchers say that while the winter colonies in Mexico have shrunk, more butterflies are spending their winters in places like Florida. So the migration may be changing, but the overall population may not be dropping.
There’s also disagreement on the impacts of rearing programs; some scientists have cautioned against them, saying they can spread disease and disrupt migratory patterns.
In a statement published by the Xerces Society, experts warned that mass rearing can contribute to parasite spread and a host of other issues. The society has also argued that it’s better to help keep monarchs wild and improve their habitat, rather than artificially increase populations.
“All rearing of monarchs should be undertaken with extreme care, restricted to a single generation annually if the butterflies will be released, and carried out using safe rearing practices and vigilant monitoring for health and disease,” they write.
Still, the Xerces Society acknowledges there is a place for small scale rearing in education and citizen science.
The program at Interlochen is considered small scale, according to Umbarger. And for her, their focus on monarchs is warranted. Education through the rearing program is just one part of that.
The department got a grant several years ago to plant milkweed, which is a key part of the monarch’s habitat. Females lay eggs on the plant. Once they hatch, the caterpillars live and feed on the leaves.
In Michigan, lawmakers passed legislation banning noxious weeds but protecting milkweed from that designation.
Many butterfly enthusiasts plant it to try to help, but non-native milkweed can help parasites spread.
It’s important for people to understand the importance of native milkweed for monarch conservation, Umbarger said, “and stop spraying chemicals in our yard, especially around these kind of special native plants that provide the ecosystem and the habitat that these caterpillars need.”
The Interlochen greenhouse has also been tagging monarchs for years — capturing butterflies and placing a sticker on their hind wings as part of the University of Kansas’s Monarch Watch, a national community science program.
It’s just one way to try to make sense of what’s happening to monarchs.
But this morning, the students aren’t talking about studies or scientific doubts or the impact of climate on migratory patterns. Magnolia and her fellow camper Fallon Gandulla-Ghekiere are focused on the basics.
When asked what they most remember learning about the monarchs, they reply in excited unison: “They liquefy!”
That’s true. Once inside its chrysalis, parts of the caterpillar dissolve, and rearrange themselves to create new body parts, like wings — what Umbarger calls “genetic recombining.”
“Oh, and I also remember they eat their egg,” Fallon said, and Magnolia agreed: “Oh yeah, when they’re born their first meal is their own egg.”
Right now, the goal is to get them interested, so that hopefully they’ll want to continue to learn.
“It’s neat what different animals and creatures can do and it’s neat how we don’t even know how to do those things,” Fallon said. “It’s their own magic.”