 and I kind of want to play them up. All right, so whatever your favorite butterfly, there's a reason to care and protect them and that is what we are going to cut to now. So we are going back to the conference. This is a breakout session. And so we are going to throw it to you. If you care about butterflies, particularly monarchs or whatever, whatever your favorite butterfly is, we're going to learn more about it going back now to the Nobel Conference here at Gustavus Adolphus College. And it's migration. So you might recognize some of the logos on this slide here. We've got federal agencies, small nonprofits, universities, research institutions, and anything and everything in between. But we're all doing work in some sector of monarch conservation. We have organization partners who are working in partnership. That's their goal is to bring people together to do the work that needs to be done. We've got partners working on education, science, and habitat. And my role within the Monarch Joint Venture is to manage our education programs and that includes speaking events like this. Local programming here in Minnesota, workshops for teachers and educators, and our education program also does some online learning as well. So those are the four pillars of our work. Habitat, education, science, and partnership. Everything that we do has something to do with one of those four pillars. The work that we do benefits monarchs, yes, but it also benefits all of the other organisms with which monarchs share habitat. We use monarchs as a flagship for conservation. Everybody raised their hand earlier. They've heard of monarch butterflies. How many of you love monarch butterflies? Okay. So because people love monarch butterflies, we can use them as kind of that hook to get people interested in conservation and know that whatever people are doing to help monarch butterflies is also affecting all of the other organisms that monarchs are connected to, which is a lot, everything really. So that's why we exist. We exist because people care. People love monarchs, people love wildlife, and people want to do something to help. So our role is to guide that work. So on the surface, the monarch lifecycle looks pretty simple or as simple as a monarch or an organism that goes through metamorphosis can be. All monarchs begin their life as an egg. They hatch into a caterpillar. That caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, and that chrysalis then turns into a butterfly. This is the same lifecycle as all other butterflies and all other moths and many other orders of insects also go through complete metamorphosis. But the monarch lifecycle depends on one particular thing, and that's milkweed. Milkweed is their only host plant, and it is the only host plant that monarchs recognize as a food source. So while there are dozens of different species of milkweed native to North America and they can use any one of them, if milkweed goes away, so do the monarchs. They absolutely depend on it to complete their lifecycle. Other types of butterflies and moths can use multiple different types of plants as their host plant, but monarchs, it's just milkweed. Monarch eggs are small. How many of you have ever seen a monarch egg before? Few hands, okay? So they're very small. They're kind of a light yellow or cream color. They're usually laid on the underside of the leaves, and they're only about the size of a pinhead. So if you have young eyes, you'll be able to hopefully find them easily, but if your eyes are aging or you need glasses or you've just never really been able to see that far away, you might need to get down closer to the ground to get a good look at them. They're usually on the underside of the leaves, but as you can see from this photo, they can also be found on the flower buds, and I don't have an image in here, but also on the tops of the leaves, the seed pods, and the stems, really anywhere on the plant. It just happens that the underside of the leaves are where the abdomen of the female is most easily able to access to lay her eggs. When they're ready to hatch, as you can tell in this center right picture, the egg will begin to show the blackhead of the caterpillar beneath. That's when you know there's going to be a caterpillar coming out of that egg any minute now. Once hatched, the caterpillar will eat its egg casing before it starts to nibble on the milkweed plant. The larval stage lasts about two weeks, give or take a few days. It all depends on temperature. Monarch and other insect life development is dependent on temperature in many ways. And every few days for monarchs, they will molt into a new stage of larval development. So that's what you see in this center leaf here. We've got the egg in the top right corner there, and then the caterpillar's first, second, third, fourth, and fifth instar stages. Now instar is just a scientific word for the period between larval molts. There are five of them for monarchs. Other butterflies and moths also have five instars. How many of you have seen all of these stages? How many of you have only ever really seen the bigger ones? Yeah, that's what I thought. Most people don't notice monarchs on their milkweed until they get to about a couple inches long. They're very, very, very small, just a few millimeters long when they first hatch. And so it's totally reasonable to not ever really see them until they're big enough for you to just kind of glance at the plant and say, oh my gosh, what's that? And then get a closer look. So throughout the two weeks that monarchs are caterpillars, they grow 2,000 times their original size. Now to put that into scale for you, that would be like a human infant, a seven-pound baby, growing to the size of an elephant in just two weeks. Those of you who are parents or have children in your lives, you know how much food that would take, you know how much waste that produces, and you know how much work that is. These caterpillars' main job is to eat and eat and eat. Very little rest. They'll sleep that night a little bit, but it's a lot of waste, a lot of food, a lot of milkweed. But it's kind of an incredible process, just a huge amount of growth in a very short period of time. But when that period of time is over, they will typically leave the milkweed plant to go find a place to form their chrysalis. They'll hang upside down in a J-shape, which you can see in the left photo there for several hours, and then afterwards they will molt one final time into their pupil stage, and I have a sequence of that here. So from left to right, we have the sequence of monarch pupation. How many of you have ever seen a monarch form its chrysalis before? Okay, it's pretty cool, right? How long did it take? Two minutes, yeah, that's exactly it. It takes about two minutes, maybe three depending on the humidity levels and the temperature. But so this first series of five photos shows the progression. It first straightens out, then it kind of bursts open the back of its head, kind of like an alien. And then it'll use its muscles to shimmy that skin up its body towards its feet. And now the really cool part about the process of pupation for butterflies who hang upside down especially, is that you see that stem-like structure at the top of the pupa there? That's called the Cremaster, C-R-E-M-A-S-T-E-R. The Cremaster is what holds the pupa hanging from the silk button that the caterpillar spun. And so what happens in this center photo here, once that skin has reached the top of the chrysalis, that Cremaster comes out from apparently nowhere, but it is present in the caterpillar and inserts itself into that silk button. And somebody once described it to me like hanging one-handed from monkey bars with a glove on and having to take that glove off without falling off of the monkey, without letting go, without falling off. So there's numerous opportunities for this process to fail, but the fact that they do it so successfully, often enough that there are millions of monarchs in the world, is kind of amazing. And the Cremaster, the tip of that Cremaster is covered in little, tiny hooks, kind of like Velcro or crochet hooks. And the silk button, the silk threads are just kind of woven all over. So what that Cremaster is doing is securing the pupa so it doesn't fall. So you'll see it kind of wiggle around. Sometimes we call it the pupa dance. But you'll see it wiggle around and what the pupa is doing is trying to make sure it's as secure as possible before it starts hardening. So two minutes to molt and get that Cremaster really secure in there. And then it's another 30 minutes before the shape of the pupa starts to harden into what we recognize as a monarch chrysalis. Anybody know how long the pupa stage lasts? I'm guessing somebody in that corner might know. How much? Eight to 14 days. You guys know your stuff. Yeah, it's about two weeks. So from egg to adult, it's about a month for monarchs that are breeding here in the summertime. So when a monarch is ready to e-close or emerge from its chrysalis, it's not hatching because this is not an egg. But when it's ready to e-close, you'll start to notice that the pigment is starting to show through that pupil casing. And when that happens, you'll know that a monarch butterfly will emerge within just a few hours. But it breaks open that pupil casing and comes out of the chrysalis and hangs upside down for several hours. And if you've ever seen this happen, it's really fascinating to watch because for the first few minutes, it's abdomen pulsates like a heartbeat because it's pumping fluids, it's hemolymph, it's blood into its wings to fully inflate them so that it's able to fly. But those wings are very, very wet for the first several hours. So they need to hang upside down like this in order for those wings to dry as straight, perfectly straight as possible to ensure their best chance of survival. So this is also a very vulnerable stage. They can't fly away, they can barely walk. So if anything comes across them at this stage, they're kind of sitting ducks. So again, it's amazing that so many monarchs make it past this stage to fly around where we can see them. So from the age to adult, I mentioned is about a month, but as an adult, the monarchs that we see here in the summer can live anywhere between two or three to six weeks long. And the whole time they're looking for milkweed, nectar, and mate. How many of you can tell the difference between a male and a female? Any guesses? If you think that the male is on the right, raise your right hand. And if you think the male is on the left, raise your left hand. Okay, I'm seeing a mix. So we have the female on the left and the male on the right. And I'll point out how we, those of us who knew, see those dots there. That's how we know it's a male. They are sexually dimorphic, which means that the males and females have differences. And for the males, most people recognize the dots. If those dots are not present, you'll know it's a female. You can also look at the abdomen by, tell their sex by looking at their abdomen, but obviously that's not easy to do when they're flying or resting on flowers. So most people just look for those dots. I'll circle them again here. Those are called androconial patches and in other types of butterflies, they're used for pheromone receptors and mating, but they're useless in monarchs. They don't use them that way anymore. So I mentioned that monarchs that fly around here in Minnesota can live up to six weeks long, but there's one special generation, one unique generation every year. And that's the monarchs that hatch from eggs in August. These monarchs at the end of the season are generally the ones that hatch after about August 15th, we say, in this part of the state. And they are physiologically different than the monarchs that are found here in the rest of the summer. They are in a state of reproductive diapause. And what that means is that they are in a state of delayed sexual maturity until conditions are more favorable for mating. What happens here in August and September and October fall? Is there a lot of milkweed around? Would a butterfly want to stick around for the winter? Most of us don't want to stick around for winter either. So no, monarchs have a strategy to avoid the most harsh conditions of this part of the world, and that is to migrate. And by going into a state of reproductive diapause, they are allowing themselves to live longer in order to make that possible. So the monarchs in the fall receive cues from nature, lower nighttime temperatures, a lower angle of the sun in the sky, decreasing quality of the milkweed, things like that. All of those contribute to the hormonal triggers or lack of triggers that put a monarch in reproductive diapause. So the monarchs that migrate can live seven to nine times longer than the monarchs that we see here in the summertime. So that's up to nine months. Because they are flying almost 3,000 miles south to Mexico and there's a similar migration west of the Rocky Mountains, but the North American monarchs migrate, at least in the eastern part of the United States and Canada will migrate to central Mexico. So this migration is probably one of the most, in my opinion, spectacular migrations in the world. I know some people may disagree on that, but it's often in the top 10 or 20 migrations on the planet. But monarchs year after year without fail have migrated to central Mexico or coastal California for as long as we can remember. But they migrate for the same reason other animals migrate because the conditions of where they're leaving are going to be too harsh for them to survive, either because it's too cold or because the resources they need to survive are no longer present there. So for monarchs it's both. They don't have milkweed here, excuse me, they don't have milkweed here in the winter months and it's too cold for them to survive. They cannot survive harsh freezing temperatures. The fall migration begins in August and like I said earlier, monarchs fly up to 3,000 miles to their overwintering sites just west of Mexico City. So these are the fourth and fifth generations of the year. These final generations of monarchs of the year. They can live up to nine months. It's partly due to their state of reproductive diapause, but it's also because they spend their winter in areas that's not too hot but not too cold. They're not going to Cancun, they're not going to Puerto Vallarta, they're going to the mountains of central Mexico. It's not a fun beach vacation like we here in Minnesota think of taking in the middle of January when it's 50 below zero. It's just right. If it were too hot, they would burn through all of the lipid stores that they built up during the migration, but if it's too cold, they freeze. So the lipids that they gain through the migration by drinking nectar are extremely important during this period because there is very little to no nectar available to them during the winter months. It's mostly conifers, grasses, shrubs and things like that until springtime when the flowers start coming out. So making sure that they have enough nectar available to them is something that we can do as humans to support the monarch migration. But they need to gain enough weight to last them through the winter. It's like bears in hibernation. They don't eat enough in the fall and the summer, they won't survive the winter. Monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains spend their winters in groves of eucalyptus, Monterey pine, cypress and some other tree species along the coast of California. And the clusters of monarchs in coastal California can range from just a few monarchs to several thousand or several, sorry, several hundred or several thousand. However, monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains spend their winters in the OML fur forest of central Mexico. And there are anywhere between five and 15 colonies that range in size from just a few trees to a few acres of trees. So there are vastly more monarchs overwintering in Mexico than there are in California. No matter where they are though, most monarchs, most of the winter move very, very little. But as spring approaches and the weather starts to change, they will start to become more active, seeking out nectar sources, seeking out water. They'll leave their roots and find any nectar or water that might be available to them. Excuse me. So in the spring, it's kind of reverse, right? So they went to Mexico all in one generation, stopping along the way to nectar and roost in trees. But in the spring, the migration can begin as early as February. Usually it's early February for the western monarchs and late February or early March for eastern monarchs. But unlike the fall generation, the fall migration, the spring migration takes more than one generation to complete the cycle. So monarchs that are leaving Mexico or coastal California move north or northwest, mating and laying eggs along the way. You could see that in the green outline sections here in central California and then the southern US. They'll make it to that green section roughly. There's obviously some variation. And then they've laid the eggs, they've mated, and then they die. Their offspring then grow up to complete the migration northward. So the monarchs that we see here returning to us in Minnesota in late May and early June are the offspring of the monarchs that overwintered in central Mexico. Not necessarily a direct lineage, but in general, the monarchs that we see here in June and late May are the ones that grew up in the southern US and are the children of the monarchs that overwintered in Mexico. So just to kind of recap, their annual migration takes four to five generations to complete. The monarchs that you see returning to us in Minnesota are the children or the grandchildren of the monarchs that left us last fall to overwinter. And again, not necessarily a direct lineage. But to me, the most fascinating thing about this annual cycle of monarchs is that they are finding the same groves of trees, the same forests to overwinter in that they've been finding for thousands of years, and they find it without fail every single year. They've never been there before, they will never see it again, and yet they still come. One question that we get a lot at the Monarch Train Fenture is, do Western monarchs ever overwinter in Mexico? And the short answer to that is yes, there is some overlap. There was a study between 2014 and 2016 where about 3,200 monarchs were tagged in Southeastern Arizona. They were tagged on the same day at the same site, and then some of them were recovered in coastal California and some of them were recovered in central Mexico. So there is some mixing. They are, however, globally genetically different. The North American population is very similar genetically, but globally they are different. The monarchs that we see here in North America are genetically different from the monarchs that are found in the Pacific, that are found in Central, South America, Atlantic, South Caribbean, and then there's another population that has emerged in the last 30 years, and that's commercial monarchs, monarchs that are bred commercially for various reasons that I won't get into today. Monarchs are, they originated here in North America. They are not native to other parts of the world, but they are now found in many, many other parts of the world. Australia, New Zealand, the Mediterranean, Africa, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, so and that's primarily humans are thought to be the main cause of that movement, but it's also possible that they somehow found their ways, they're in other ways. One of the great things about the monarch population though is that because most of them go to the same places from year after year, it actually made, that sounded very Minnesotan, it actually makes it very easy to estimate their population because we can get a snapshot because they're all in the same space, or most of them are in the same space. So the trees in this picture that was taken by Dr. Lincoln Brower in the 1980s are orange because they're covered in monarch butterflies. I know here in the Midwest sometimes we're used to seeing rust colored conifers because they got frostbite, that did not happen here, they're covered in monarch butterflies. It's a really great way though to demonstrate how the population is counted and so I'm going to use my little laser pointer on my computer here. But so what scientists and conservation professionals do when they're counting the overwintering population of monarchs in Mexico, it's a little different in California is they'll go to one part, you know, one edge of the forest and kind of geotag that area and then walk on foot around the entire perimeter of that colony and then measure the area of that colony and then add up those five to 15 colonies, the area of each of those to populate graphs like this. So I'm going to let you all take a look at this graph while I take a sip of my tea and let it sink in a little bit. What does this, what story is this graph telling us? So somebody asked what happened in 2013 right here, okay, could be drought, any other thoughts? What story overall is this graph telling us? Decline, that's been a theme of today, hasn't it? Decline, monarchs are not immune to that. It is declining, the population has declined. I can't say for sure that it is continuing to decline because we won't know that until we're past this point in time but it has declined a lot, 80% since we started counting monarchs in like this in the 1980s. And so a lot of people wonder what happened in that year of 2013 and 2014 and I remember that year, I was teaching summer camp at Como Zoo, I was running the camp program there and one of the camps used monarch butterflies as an engagement tool and I couldn't find any, there were none, I could not find a single monarch that entire summer. And then the following winter, I got my job with monarch conservation and then I learned why because these numbers came out and I realized I wasn't seeing monarchs because nobody was seeing monarchs, it wasn't just me. I knew where to look, other people knew where to look, there just weren't any monarchs that year. And the reasons for decline, I'll talk about a little bit but that was the year that kind of jump started, a lot of the work that's being done in monarch conservation today. I'll also note that this fluctuation of ups and downs is normal in any population but the problem is when these fluctuations of ups and downs are going down together as we see in this graph. So before I move to the next slide, I'll explain a little bit because I couldn't get my pictures to work as I was pulling this together but I was gonna put a picture up of an overwintering colony in California and they're much smaller but no less magnificent but because they are smaller, volunteers who count the monarch population in California are able to estimate them by individual and so what they do is they look at a cluster of monarchs and they count a small piece of it and say, okay, there's 50 monarchs there and then they extrapolate that number kind of like the how many jelly beans are in this jar sort of trick. If you didn't know how to solve that problem now you do. But they put these numbers out every year as well. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation does an official count around the three weeks of Thanksgiving every year and this graph tells a similar story but there's one additional thing and I'll see if you can see it and just like the other graph we've got the year on the X-axis and the number of monarchs on the Y-axis. Anybody notice anything about this particular graph? Not quite. The question was is 2020 actually a zero and it's not quite and I'll talk about that in a second. The other thing to note about this graph is that there's actually two sets of data here. The number of monarchs reported or recorded and the number of sites monitored. Now there are over like 400 sites where monarchs overwinter in California or have been overwintering in California and so the blue line that you see at the top of the graph there is showing the number of sites monitored in any given year. And you'll notice that that line is going up while accepting three years in the middle there the Western monarch population has remained anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 accepting the three years previous to this one. So it's taking more and more sites in order to get the numbers that we've been seeing. Your question about what happened in 2020 it's not actually zero but the scale on this graph is not tall enough to show us how many monarchs were actually counted in California which was just under 2000. That was very concerning. A lot of us in the monarch conservation world were very alarmed when we saw those numbers. We were also alarmed in 2018 when we saw that there were fewer than or just about 30,000 monarchs in 2018 and 2019. And then to see fewer than 2000 monarchs in 2020 just kind of put the nail in the coffin or how much that year sucked. At least for those of us in the conservation sphere. So let's talk about pressures on monarchs. Monarchs have many, many natural threats, natural pressures, predators, parasites, natural fluctuations in weather. These are all things that monarchs have co-evolved with. They are adapted to deal with the pressures of predation. They're adapted to deal with the pressures of parasitism and the pressures of weather. They're adapted to that just like many other insects. They lay hundreds of eggs. One female monarch can lay anywhere between 200 and 500 eggs in their lifetime. Now if all of those eggs survived, we would be overrun with monarchs. And so those pressures help keep the balance of the ecosystem and of the population. And that's true for any other organism as well. It is normal for a mortality rate of two to five percent in an organism that lays hundreds of eggs. It's true for sea turtles. It's true for fish. It's true for other types of insects. Their adaptation for that is to lay more eggs. These are the things that we don't really have to worry about. We should keep an eye on them in case there's a misbalance or a outlier of something that crops up, you know, invasive species and things like that, which are concerning. But these are things that monarchs, in general, are well adapted to survive if conditions allow them to. And that's where it gets complicated. The biggest drivers for the population decline for monarchs are the same things we heard this morning from this morning's speakers, human-driven threats, habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change. But the good news is that because these are human-driven threats, there are things that we can do about them. In relation to climate change, just to note, the loss of breeding habitat and hotter weather are kind of combining to be one super monster of having lower population of monarchs. So they could survive one as long as the other one weren't happening possibly, but because both of these things and then the pressures of pesticide use are happening all at once, they're not as well suited to survive those types of pressures. So to get a little technical here, when we hear about the population decline or when we talk about it, people worry and they wonder and rightly so, but how low is too low? And this is where we start talking about the quasi-extinction risk. How many of you have heard the term quasi-extinction before? Okay, not many. So quasi-extinction is the point at which extinction is inevitable because the population has dropped below the point at which it can recover. It's a death vortex or a death spiral, essentially. And so there were a lot of studies that were done and they're cited here, the Semmins at All paper in 2016 and then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Endangered Species Act listing decision from 2020. For Eastern Monarchs, this threshold could be anywhere between 0.01 to 0.25 hectares. And you remember, we measure Eastern Monarchs in how much space they take up, not how many individuals there are. The risk of reaching this number is high, somewhere between 3 and 42% by 2025, which is just a couple of years away. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Semmins at All group is reevaluating these numbers with new data to see if this risk has changed. By 2075, that risk goes up to 48 to 69%. And that's if we don't do anything. For Western Monarchs, scientists looked at the growth rate of the population, environmental variation and abundance of butterflies. And the quasi-extinction threshold for Western Monarchs is 20,000 to 40,000 individual monarchs. The risk of reaching this is so high that we've seen it three years in a row. Monarchs were at or below these numbers. The risk of reaching it again, if we do nothing, is 50 to 75% within the next 20 years. 99% within the next 60 years. So what should our target be? What should our goal be? Should we just aim for those thresholds and expect them to sustain themselves at that level? No, probably not, because those levels are precariously low. Like those are the point at which, if they drop below them, monarchs wouldn't recover. So we want to avoid that and we want to keep them comfortably higher than those levels so that if monarchs are faced with additional pressures, they can survive them. So we ideally would like Western Monarchs to be around 500,000 individuals and Eastern Monarchs to be at six hectares. The average of monarchs in Mexico for the last 10 years has been about between three and four hectares. So we've got some work to do. I don't know what that was. I know it was my computer, but it's telling me something. So what's being done? I mentioned that 2013, 2014 was kind of the impetus for a lot of the monarch conservation work, but we've had a lot of milestones over the last almost 50 years. From the, and I'm putting this in quotation marks, the discovery of the monarch overwintering sites in central Mexico. And I quote, air quote that because the people of Mexico knew that they were there. It's just Western white people science learned that they were there. So the discovery of that brought monarchs under the spotlight for the rest of the world. Lots of conservation efforts popped up in the 90s. 2015, sorry, 2014, the petition to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list monarchs under the Endangered Species Act was submitted, which snowballed a lot of other stuff. But there have been a lot of things happening. There's lots of plans that have been made, a lot of work that's been being done. And last, sorry, not last summer, the summer before this most recent one, monarchs were put on the red list for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It made big headlines. It's gonna make headlines again this winter. But I wanna emphasize that this is not the same as the United States Endangered Species Act. It doesn't provide any protections or regulatory authority. It just provides a, hey, here's the state of the science of what the science is showing us of monarch, the global population of monarchs. So it is different from the ESA, but the assessments are similar and the results are consistent with what the Fish and Wildlife Service determined the status of monarchs to be in 2020. The IUCN statement of where monarchs are at, which was endangered and is now, I think they've uplisted it to threatened, does not affect how we continue to do conservation or what needs to happen to increase their population for monarchs and other pollinators. With the U.S. Endangered Species Act, that 2014 petition started a 90-day finding which showed that it was warranted to look into further, which led into a three-year-long species status assessment study and the Monarch Conservation Database. And then in December of 2020, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the listing of the monarch butterfly is warranted but precluded by other higher priority species. Ever since then, monarchs have been going under an annual review process to determine if listing is warranted sooner, but it is expected that this current fiscal year of 2024, there will be a final decision on whether or not monarchs will be listed under the Endangered Species Act. So as of today, they do not have any federal protections in the United States. But, and we heard Anzei earlier, we need hope, there's a lot of hope to be had with this. We're all here because we love bugs, right? We're not the only ones in the world that love bugs. We're not the only ones in this state or this country that love bugs. People care. Monarchs are something that brings a lot of people together. They are built into our cultures. They're built into our memories. They're built into our stories. People care. There are lots of people working on this. I showed this slide earlier as a representation of our partnership with the monarch joint venture, but this isn't everybody that works on monarch conservation. There are countless other organizations that are doing things for monarchs and it doesn't measure the number of people, individuals and families and communities that are doing things for monarchs either. It also doesn't measure the international work that's happening for monarch conservation. Groups in Canada and Mexico and all of the nations in between there are also working on monarch conservation. Monarchs are one of the most intensively studied organisms ever in the world. There is someone somewhere monitoring some part of the monarch life cycle at any given point in the year. People looking at the migration, people looking at the overwintering numbers, people looking at breeding monarchs and parasites and diseases and habitat. They are extremely well studied and we know a lot about them but there are still more things to learn. So where do all of you come in? What can you do? Here are my simple steps for you. Explore and learn. Hooray, you've already done that. You started your journey if you haven't already today by exploring and learning more. I know that the growing season is nearing its end but I saw three monarchs flying around in my neighborhood this past weekend probably because it's like summer still but you can go out and explore, take a look at what you notice outside. Where is the milkweed? Where isn't the milkweed? Where are the nectar flowers? Where aren't the nectar flowers? And once you know that, you can plant things. You can plant milkweed. You can plant habitat. Remember that all pollinators need a continuous bloom of nectar sources, a diversity of native nectar plants, host plants, places to nest and raise their babies. That's not just plants, it's also ground cover, bare ground, stems, leave the leaves, leave the stems, the bees will come, hopefully. There are over 100 species of milkweed native to North America. I've got some examples on this slide of where you can look to find plant resource guides. The Xerces Society has great plant guides. Pollinator Partnership has eco-regional plant guides. My favorite is the National Wildlife Federation's native plant finder. You type in your zip code and it gives you a populated list of keystone plants that are available in your area and highly important to pollinators of your region. And then, of course, local nurseries. And MJV and the Xerces Society both have vendor maps. So you can take a look at our websites and find these maps. I took a screen grab of our map from here. And I know that we're in Minnesota, but some of us are snowbirds and we go to Florida or Arizona or somewhere else warm and not negative 30 degrees below zero in January. And one of the things that we encourage people is to not plant tropical milkweed because it can perpetuate diseases and winter breeding for monarchs. It's not native to most of North America, so if you're going to places where milkweed, where tropical milkweed can grow, find a native plant instead and avoid pesticides. Neonics especially are secret sort of sometimes. They're sneaky in how they're advertised, like these tags you'll see. This plant is protected from problematic aphids, whiteflies, beetles, mealybugs, and other unwanted pests by neonicotinoids. And they are approved by the EPA and I believe the FDA for food consumption. But what this tag isn't telling us is that it also harms all of the beneficial insects, the pollinators, butterflies, bees, the things that we do want in her garden. So watch out for that. A third thing you can do is to contribute to citizen science. There's a handful of monarch citizen or community science programs. Many of all of these are monarch joint venture partners. The three on the right and the one on the bottom left, Journey North, Monarch Watch, the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project and Project Monarch Health are all programs that you can participate in in Minnesota. Journey North tracks the migration through observation. Monarch Watch tracks the migration through tagging. The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project watches, has volunteers go out every week looking for monarch eggs and caterpillars on milkweed plant to get a snapshot of the breeding season. And Project Monarch Health looks at parasites, a specific one called ophryocystis electroschera. We call it OE for short. You can participate in any of them. They're all free, there's training online and it helps us learn more about the monarch population and all of these programs have contributed data to the monarch conservation database to help inform the listing decision of monarch butterflies. One, another simple thing you can do if you have the means is to donate to conservation organizations. Particularly if you don't have a place where you can participate in citizen science or plant milkweed and other nectar plants, this is a way to expand those dollars and allow them to go where they're needed most. And then finally, I heard one of the panelists say at this morning, vote for the things that can't speak for themselves. That includes the next generation coming up behind us. Share your knowledge, have conversations with your friends, your family, your community members about what's important to you and hopefully have positive disagreements, disagree well with people in your community and listen to what they have to say because sometimes you might be saying the same thing in different ways and your goals are the same. Our goal is happiness for everybody ideally but also a world in which we can all thrive in not just survive but thrive. So we need all hands on deck. We can work together to protect this amazing organism and all of the other organisms connected to it and whatever way they are. We can make a difference and if anybody has any questions I believe we have time for some. Yes, great question. So the question was they raised monarchs but they've heard that they don't do as well and they're wondering if there's a better way to raise them. So the Monarch Joint Ventures stands on that and even some of our partners disagree, it's fine. Not everybody has to be in 100% agreement on everything all the time. But MJV stands is that if you're raising monarchs you should also be contributing to a citizen science program like the ones that I mentioned earlier. The Monarch Lab and Monitoring Project, tagging, testing for OE. They're a great engagement tool. I use them in my workshops. But generally if you're going to be raising monarchs contributing to a community or citizen science program, individual containers helps keep data on individual monarchs and then sanitizing them between new monarchs coming in and keeping the numbers low. I don't ever raise more than 10 at a time. More than that is too much work for me. It's a lot of milkweed. It's a lot of cleaning. It's a lot of work. But it's also a way to help keep diseases down. And I know a lot of people and I don't raise monarchs after August because of the concerns where I think one of the ones that you might be thinking of is reared monarchs don't orient themselves south necessarily in all cases to migrate. And one of the cues that monarchs receive to migrate is day length and angle of the sun. And if they're inside and temperature, and if they're inside, they don't get those cues or don't get them 100% of the time. So people that I know who are raising monarchs in that time of the year do so outside but not in direct sunlight because those containers are like little greenhouses. And they don't want to grow monarchs the way you grow plants. Yeah, and we have more information on that on our website too. And feel free to email me if you have more questions. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Where does OE play in as a pressure to monarchs? They did co-evolve and so the Project Monarch Health which is the program that's based in Georgia that studies this parasite has done, they've published several papers on this. They have found that monarchs that are highly infected with OE cannot fly as fast or as far as their healthy counterparts. So what happens is that the migration culls out sick individuals and keeps the population healthy. And so the interesting thing with that though is that the prevalence of OE is increasing without any evident cause. So that's why it's important for us to learn more about the monarch population as a whole. We don't know why the prevalence of OE is increasing across the continent unless we get more people submitting different kinds of data. So, yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the question was my presentation focused on North American monarchs and the question was are there monarchs in other parts of the world or a comparable species? And the answer to that is both. There are monarchs in other parts of the world. They're not native but they are found in Australia and New Zealand and they migrate in Australia and New Zealand but for different reasons. They follow the water. There's monarchs in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands. I think there was a monarch spotted in England a few years ago. They can't really live there. It's a little too cold and there's not a lot of milkweed but every once in a while they'll cross up that far. And there are other species of denaided butterflies. Monarchs are deneous plexiphas and the denaided genus are milkweed butterflies and there are other milkweed butterflies in I think any continent that milkweed grows on and there's also other organisms that eat milkweed that have similar colors. Like there's a grasshopper in Africa that's black and orange and white just like a monarch that eats milkweed. And I can't remember the name of it but if you email me I can look it up and send it to you. Yes. How can we protect overwintering sites? Oh, that's a great question. So the answer to that depends on where you're protecting them. Monarchs, the monarch butterfly overwintering sites in Mexico are already protected. They are part of the monarch butterfly biosphere reserve which was decreed as a protected area by the Mexican government. Keep in mind though that land management and land ownership in Mexico is very, very different than it is in the United States and Canada. It's protected by the government but it has still lived on, managed and protected essentially by the people that live there, the ejeditarios. And so they are ultimately tasked with keeping things healthy and that humans are not perfect, right? So there's a lot of conditions that can both help the people there or hurt the people there and in turn the forests. So donating to conservation organizations in Mexico is one way that we here in the United States can help. Don't go down there and say like, hey, I wanna help and then expect them to let you help them because they know what needs to happen and they just need the resources to do it and the resources isn't always people. It's fuel for their fires, it's food for their stomachs and shelter for their families. And so the organizations that are providing conservation dollars to those communities are able to do that much better than we can. In California, it's a little bit different. The overwintering sites in California range from state parks to grocery store parking lots to golf courses to people's backyards. There are currently no blanket protections for overwintering sites in California but there are groups like the Xerces Society that are working on that and you can learn more about those efforts on their website and they'll be able to help with how best to protect those overwintering sites in California. It's a complicated issue which means it needs a complicated solution but we can do it. All right, if anybody has any other questions, I'm here for the rest of the day. I have cards and some paper handouts if you're interested in taking any today. My contact information is up on the slide. Feel free to email us, reach out. Happy to answer any questions that anybody else has. Thanks for having me today everybody.