# NEB Podcast #48 -
Interview with Orley ‘Chip’ Taylor: Understanding the Monarch Butterfly
reposted from https://international.neb.com/
Transcript
Interviewers: Lydia Morrison, Marketing Communications Writer & Podcast Host, New England Biolabs, Inc.
Interviewees: Orley ‘Chip’ Taylor, F ounder, Monarch Watch
Lydia Morrison:
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Lessons from Lab and Life Podcast, brought to you by New England Biolabs. I’m your host, Lydia Morrison, and I hope this episode brings you some new perspective. Today I am joined by Chip Taylor, founder of the nonprofit Monarch Watch, which provides education, conservation, and research focused on the recently named endangered species, the monarch butterfly. He’s here today to share with us what he’s learned in his lifelong research of the monarch butterfly and how we can help protect this special insect. Good morning, Chip. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Chip Taylor:
Good morning, glad to be with you.
Lydia Morrison:
And we’re also joined today by my colleague James. James, thanks for being here as well.
James Deng:
Thanks for the invite.
Lydia Morrison:
Absolutely. So Chip, could you tell us how you became interested in monarch butterflies and how Monarch Watch got started?
Chip Taylor:
Yes. I was teaching a graduate course, a field biology course, and we had to find problems that students could work on in the field and bring the data back to the classroom and analyze the data. And I started working with monarch butterflies during the fall migration. And as I got into it, I realized that not much was really known about the migration. And then in 1992, realizing that the work I was doing with the so-called killer bees, which I had been working on since 1974, I realized I was coming to an end. I started looking around for another project to engage me personally and professionally. And at that point, we started a tagging program. It was kind of going to be a research program. The idea was to try to learn a little bit more about the migration.
We sent out two news releases that fall of 1992, and I had a colleague I was working with who was able to print very small labels at that time. And we worked together and we sent out something like 30,000 tags at that time. And we had something like 30 or 40,000 students and others involved in the tagging that fall. We didn’t have any recoveries in Mexico, but we had a great time and people were really excited about the program. They were very anxious to participate in gathering information about monarch butterflies. So that was the start. Just to give you an idea of what it was like in 1992, when we put out the news releases in the Des Moines newspaper and said, “Hey, we’re looking for volunteers to help us tag monarch butterflies,” we had 500 responses. And they came in on a phone in which all of those responses were recorded on tape, and we had to take down all that information from the tape, the addresses, the phone numbers and everything else, where to send the tags.
And it was very labor intensive. So now everything is much easier with all of the media development that we’ve got. We can do a lot of things by email that we certainly couldn’t do in 1992. So things were very different then. And we struggled a little bit to get our program started, but by 1993 and '94, we were off and running, and we realized that we really had a program that we had to keep going because the public was just intensively interested in monarch butterflies and they’re interested in learning more about them. So we evolved into an education program, primarily, kind of an outreach effort along with this little research program we started in tagging on our butterflies, and eventually we developed a new tagging system, a much more effective one, in 1997. And from then on, the recoveries of tags in Mexico really accelerated. And then we realized that we had a very strong possibility for capturing data that would really elaborate on how this migration functioned.
James Deng:
You’re considered one of the leading experts on monarch butterflies and their migration, and you’ve published many articles and papers on this. Can you tell us how many over the years?
Chip Taylor:
Oh no, I really haven’t kept track. A lot of those papers are co-authored papers with a number of other people. When we sit down and have group meetings and try to come up with a general view of something that has to do with monarchs, there might be 10 or 12 people on a paper, and we’ve all made contributions. So yeah, the ones that I’m really most concerned about, the ones I feel best about are the two papers we published recently. One was on the synchrony of the migration with the declining angle of the sun at solar noon. There was a problem, a longstanding problem of trying to understand the timing of this migration. And it took a long time to figure this out, but we knew that the monarchs arrived first in Mexico almost the same day every year, and we couldn’t figure out why.
And then as I got into the migration a little bit more, we realized that there was a pattern, and that pattern was predictable. And then the question was, how do we link that pattern or something? And it turned out that it took us about 20 years to do it, but we were able to link the pattern of the migration to the declining angle of the sun at solar noon. And so the migration starts out in Winnipeg when the sun at solar noon drops below 57, and they arrive at the overwintering sites in Mexico when the sun drops below 57 at solar noon. So they’re keeping pace with this decline in the sun at solar noon as the fall progresses over a two, two-and-a-half month period. That’s pretty impressive. Now, that doesn’t mean that the link is real tight, because the pace of the migration can be modified by the lateness of the reproduction or the high temperatures during the fall, but generally the pattern holds.
And then another paper that we published recently addressed an issue that had been raised by several people who said that really what was going on with the monarch population is that it was declining because there was a lot of mortality during the migration itself. While there’s no question that there’s a lot of mortality during the migration, the question was, was it really driving the numbers? And the answer is no. We were able to show in that paper that migration mortality hypothesis that accounts for the lower numbers of monarchs over the years just doesn’t hold. It’s not supported by the data. So those are the papers we’ve been most involved with, and we have about four others that we’re working on right now, which will show quite a bit more about the dynamics of the migration.
James Deng:
What an amazing correlation you’ve made on that migration. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that level of detail that you’ve described with the migration and how it’s influenced by these factors.
Chip Taylor:
It takes a lot of data to get that together, and that’s why we’re in this. You get involved in projects like this. And these aren’t just one-year, one-off projects. We’re talking about 20, 30 years of data. And then you can see really significant, different patterns. You can see patterns related to weather. You can see patterns related to different parts of the country. You can see patterns related to agriculture and so on and so forth. You can see patterns in the diseases of these butterflies, if you know where to look, but it takes a massive amount of data to do so.
Lydia Morrison:
Yeah, and what a phenomenal outpouring of support from the volunteers who help complete some of these research projects too. It seems like they’re really crucial to making this data happen.
Chip Taylor:
Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, we couldn’t have done it without tens of thousands of people tagging monarch butterflies over the last 30 years.
Lydia Morrison:
So what’s unique about monarchs compared to other butterflies or insects, or maybe what do you still find most fascinating about monarchs even after studying them for all these years?
Chip Taylor:
Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, we’ve talked about this many occasions and many people have wondered about this, and I keep getting asked about this by reporters. This butterfly has charisma. And how do you explain charisma? It’s really tough to explain charisma. A lot of people don’t know much about the migration, but they’re still attracted to the butterfly. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s slow, it’s accessible. You can find the caterpillars, kids can bring them in. You can learn about those things. I mean, it’s observable. You can have unity, you can have these butterflies in your hand. You can watch them as they feed on flowers. A lot of other insects, I must say almost all other insects, are far less accessible. So this butterfly is accessible. It’s big, it’s beautiful, you can handle it, but it has something about it that keeps people interested.
And my connection with it is really kind of emotional in a lot of ways because I’ll just give you an example. In 17th of November 2000… No, I’m sorry, 1997, there was a conference in Morelia, Mexico. Morelia is not far away from where the colonies are in the mountains, a little bit to the east. So we skipped the conference one day, and we went to see the monarchs that were coming into the overwintering sites. And as we got into the forest, we could see the butterflies assembling on the tree, masses and masses of butterflies coming into the trees. It was a partly cloudy day, and you could see them against the sky coming in great numbers.
And as we were looking up in the trees, I heard this little noise in the undergrowth, and I kept hearing it in different places. And I finally looked down on the ground and started shuffling around, and there were dead butterflies and dying butterflies all over the forest floor, and I’m going, “Oh my gosh, here it is that these butterflies have flown for two months, three months to get here, to die within days of arrival because of broken wings, a lack of nectar along the way, something was happened to them and they just weren’t capable of going any further.”
You know, you think about that, and there’s this incredible drive to replicate, to reproduce, to survive, to pass on offspring in all of life. And here it was, you could see it with this butterfly. Most of the time we can’t see it. We’re not aware of all the numbers that are dying, but here I could see it. I could see it. It was right at my feet. And just to think about something that’s made a two-and-a-half month journey only to die before it had even any possibility of completing that journey, of completing its mission. I mean, that’s an emotional connection that a biologist makes. That’s an emotional connection I made with these butterflies. They are impressive. They are pretty awesome. This is a life drive that is truly exceptional. We all have it, but we seldom see it.
Lydia Morrison:
What a beautiful and tragic demonstration of nature, really, and the nature that drives all beings. That sounds like it was really personally touching for you, and I can imagine how that would be the case. What can you tell us about monarchs in other countries or other parts of the globe? Do you find the same species? Do they migrate in similar ways?
Chip Taylor:
Oh, monarchs have been actually intentionally imported to some parts of the world. They have then introduced apparently by international traffic in one way or another. So there are monarchs in Hawaii that apparently got there shortly after Hawaii was colonized. There are monarchs in New Zealand and Australia and many Pacific islands. Also, the Azores and Canaries in Gibraltar and a few other locations in the Pacific. People have moved monarchs around a lot, and they’re the same species that we have here in the United States. There are a couple of places where they have been introduced where they still migrate, the most notable one being Australia.
So I can’t tell you a great deal about how they behave in other places. As they’ve arrived on islands, they tend to be a little bit smaller, shorter wings, more rounded wings, less adapted to long-distance flight. So they’re not migrating on any of these islands, they’re just living in place. And sometimes their patterns have changed a little bit. If you go to Puerto Rico and you see monarchs in Puerto Rico, they look a little bit different… The butterfly looks the same, the larvae look a little different, the larvae darker to accommodate the difference in the sun conditions in that latitude. So yeah, it’s the same butterfly, it feeds on the same plants, it has many of the same characteristics, migrates where there’s an opportunity or need to migrate or doesn’t, depending upon the landscape that it’s in.
Lydia Morrison:
And what other kinds of research are being done on monarchs, or what kind of research do you think needs to be done still?
Chip Taylor:
On our conference that we had the other day, I meant to really bring that up and things got out of hand. We’re doing a lot of work on demography and dynamics of the population and trying to understand and make a predictable model for what’s happening or what will happen to a population four or five, six months ahead of time. And we’re making some progress in that, but we need to know a lot more about the physiology of this butterfly and its reproductive characteristics. It has a tremendous reproductive capacity, but how that capacity is fulfilled in the environments that it finds itself in really varies quite a bit and we need to know a lot more about that. But physiology is a major lack of… There’s a major problem in physiology, but there’s a lot of really, really good work being done on monarchs right now. The fact that monarchs are close to being considered endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service means that a lot of people have been interested in doing research on monarchs.
And in the tabulation that’s occurred so far this year, over 50 papers have been published on monarchs, which is pretty extraordinary for such a short period. And what that’s going to mean in the future is that we’re eventually going to move toward a really robust understanding of this species, which is exactly what we need if we are to sustain this migration. But some of the work that is really kind of under the radar, because it demands a knowledge of molecular genetics that most of us don’t have, that some of the work that’s being done that associates the environmental signals with how the signals are perceived by the butterfly, and how those signals are integrated with the brain in such a way that it changes the behavior of the butterfly. Now, those sorts of links between environment, signal reception, integration and action are not… I mean, that’s not a common area of research.
And the monarchs are really a wonderful organism for that type of research because we know enough about the system and it’s response to environmental stimuli, and it’s big enough so that you can actually work on questions like that. But to go from signal to behavior and all of that processing, that is really, really unique and it’s exceptional and it transects not only monarchs, but almost all of life. I mean, we really have to understand how the environmental signals are processed by a lot of organisms, and we’re really not there yet. But this work is being augmented and extended by research on monarchs.
Lydia Morrison:
That’s really interesting. We certainly have some experience with molecular genetics and molecular biology, so we should definitely talk more about how that research is proceeding and how we can help be a part of it.
Chip Taylor:
Yes. The woman to talk to is Christine Merlin at Texas A&M University. She is one of the most outstanding molecular geneticists in the country, if not the world.
Lydia Morrison:
Awesome. Well, we’ll reach out to her.
James Deng:
So recently, monarch butterflies were designated as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. How do you feel about this designation?
Chip Taylor:
Well, it was really very peculiar because it seems to be the precautionary principle writ large. There isn’t any near-term proximate reason for such a designation. I mean, nothing has happened within the last 10 years that indicates that this is warranted. I mean, the population isn’t continuing to decline. It’ll be low this year, but it gets low and then it recovers and so on and so forth. And what this is based on as the fact that there seems to have been a significant decline in the number since the early 1990s. Well, what that doesn’t take into consideration is what happened well before the nineties. What happened in the dirty thirties? In the dirty thirties, the population was probably much lower than it is now. You go in the early 1900s and look at the climatic data, and the populations were probably much lower than they are now.
You go back to the 1850s with the end of the little ice age and the populations were probably really, really low. The difference now is that we’re dealing with some significant changes on the planet, and some of those changes are a real threat, but we just don’t know when they’re going to hit. For example, since 2002, there have been four major winter kills at the overwintering sites. It doesn’t usually rain in central Mexico in the winter time, but it has rained significantly in those four events. And this is what happens. We are now witnessing a significant heating of the Central Pacific, and in that heating you have warm air masses with high moisture content that sometimes sweep toward the Americas, coming off the mid-Pacific, usually when there’s an El Nino. And those warm air masses, moisture-laden air masses can come into Peru, they can come into Central America, they can come into Mexico.
Well, four times since 2002, they’ve come into Mexico and they’ve had a devastating effect on the population killing 70, 80%… Or 60% of the butterflies at the overwintering sites. That is a real threat. That is a significant threat. We can’t tell when that’s going to happen, but if it has does happen when the population is really low, then it’s going to drive the population down significantly. Then if that was followed by further climatic events or weather events that were extreme, it’s possible to conceive that the population would drop to a very small level in just a matter of one or two years, with a long recovery period involved.
So looking at this from a long-term perspective, climate change, these events that are coming off the Pacific, the butterfly is going to be endangered at some point in the future. You just can’t predict it. Right now, I don’t see this as being something that’s going to happen this winter. The population’s going to be low, I think it’ll be right. The fall conditions so far have been fairly favorable for the migration, even though it’s small. So yeah, I think that this is premature. There will be a time when Monarchs will be in danger, but it’s not right now.
Lydia Morrison:
So as you might know, NEB, New England Biolabs has a strong connection to the Monarch Butterfly Monarchs. Were a favorite of our founder, Don Comb. We even have a product line actually named after the beautiful butterflies, and those are our Monarch DNA and RNA purification kits. And I’m just curious what we can do as a scientific community, or even as individual concerned admirers of the monarch butterfly, to help support Monarch Watch and to help the monarch butterflies right now.
Chip Taylor:
Well, our big role since 2005, I mean, we changed our program beginning in 2005. In 2004, I got an email from a farmer in Nebraska who said, “I’ve adopted these new crop lines that are Roundup Ready tolerant. And so I’m planting those crops, spraying my crops with Roundup, and I’m killing all of the weeds out there, including all the milkweeds. And that means that monarchs are going down in my property, seeing far fewer them.” And I go, “Oh my gosh, I’ve go to do something about this.” So we started a Monarch Waystation Program in the following year in 2005. And then we started another program in 2010 called to Bring Back the Monarchs Program, which is really a habitat restoration program, the first program being one where we encourage people to take their home gardens and plant milkweeds and nectar plants and so on and so forth.
We now have over 41,000 registered sites around the country and actually in nine different countries. So monarch waystations have become something of a brand, It’s a create-it-and-they-will-come sort of thing. And that’s good. And it’s definitely having an impact on the public, and it’s definitely having an impact, it’s favorable for the butterflies. The problem is, of course, the scale. It needs to be much, much larger. And the same thing with the Bring Back the Monarchs Program. The scale of that needs to be much larger. Since 2010 when we started that program, we’ve distributed about a million milkweed plants for restoration. We’re doing more of that sort of work than any other organization in the country, and we can do a lot more, but to do so requires underwriting. We don’t have the money to do that. The money has to come from someplace else.
And what we have been doing with that 1,000,000 plants is that we have been able to get private contributions or corporate contributions that work this way. We take about 15% of those monies that are given to us, and we use that to facilitate all the communications, all the work with nurseries, all the seed collecting, all the seed processing, all the propagation and growth that the nurseries do. And then we work out how to connect people with those plants. And so, as a university operation, we have a small overhead, so we can do this fairly cheaply, and the rest of the money goes to the nurseries to pay for the plants. And basically, the other problem up here is the recipients. Many of the recipients just don’t have the money to pay for plants, so we send the plants out free, but we’ve actually asked them to pay for the cost of shipping. That works out really well.
The problem I have with all of this is the scale of it. It’s too small. And it’s small and it’s restricted because we don’t have enough corporate support to really get more plants out the door. We have the personnel, we have the connections for the nurseries. We could do this at a much larger scale. We can build the market more, but to do that… And we always have a backlog. We always have unfulfilled expectations here because we have much more demand for these milkweeds than we can provide in terms of the underwriting. So you ask, what can corporations do? What can individuals do? Help us get those plants in the ground by providing support for our Bring Back the Monarchs Program. That’s what we need. I’ve said a number of times that we really have the capacity to distribute a million plants a year if we have the support.
Because we know how to do this, we’ve been doing it now for 12 years, and we know how to work with the nurseries. We know how all the distribution problems, we know where and when to send the milkweeds and so on and so forth. So it’s a money thing. If we had the money then we can build a market, and we can get a lot of plants in the ground every single year. The big push on all of this comes from a paper that was written that’s called the All Hands on Deck paper, which says that basically we need over a billion new stems to restore the population because of the loss of habitats that’s occurred mostly in the Midwest. So yeah, we’re not going to get there with Monarch Watch’s effort, and unless Monarch Watch and others are able to increase the number of plans that we get on the ground every year.
Lydia Morrison:
Well, I hope that this podcast can help bring some consideration to Monarch Watch and help bring some of that support that the program so desperately needs. And thank you so much for sharing your research and for all the dedicated research and conservation efforts that you have contributed over the years. It’s obviously been so valuable to the protection of the monarch butterfly, and thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for joining us, Chip.
Chip Taylor:
Well, I’m glad to be here, and thank you for listening.
James Deng:
Thank you so much, Chip.
Chip Taylor:
All right. Thank you.
Lydia Morrison:
Thanks for joining us today. Please tune in next time when my colleague Betsy Young and I interview Mihir Kekre of Tropic Biosciences, who shares his experience in antimicrobial resistance research and pathogen surveillance.