Monarch Butterflies: Past, Present, & Future

The pending petition before the Department of Interior to declare the monarch butterfly a threatened species requires that we do everything we can to understand the population dynamics of this species.

The responses of monarchs to weather events in the last two decades provide insights as to both the size of past and future monarch populations. This population dynamic has played out against a background of human driven changes in habitats across the landscapes of eastern North America and Mexico. Unfortunately, landscapes that support monarchs are continuing to decline rapidly as a result of agricultural practices, development and warming climates. These changes not only involve the loss of milkweeds and nectar sources needed to sustain reproduction and migration but extend to the persistence of the forests in Mexico that sustain the overwintering population. Will the monarch migration become a victim of climate change? Probably. Can we keep this from happening? Yes.

Speaker Bio: Chip Taylor is the Founder and Director of Monarch Watch, and an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. Trained as an insect ecologist at the University of Connecticut, his research projects have included studies of reproductive isolating mechanisms in sulfur butterflies, reproductive and life history patterns in plants, comparative biology of European and Neotropical African honey bees and migratory behavior of monarch butterflies. In 1974, Chip Taylor established research sites and directed students studying Neotropical African honey bees (killer bees) in French Guiana, Venezuela, and Mexico. In 1992, Taylor founded Monarch Watch, an outreach program focused on education, research and conservation relative to monarch butterflies. Since then, Monarch Watch has enlisted the help of volunteers to tag monarchs during the fall migration. Over 2 million monarchs have been tagged by volunteers since 1992. Of these, over nineteen thousand have been recovered. This program has provided many new insights about the dynamics of the fall monarch migration.

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