The Monarch’s Sojourn
By Sarah Schaeffer / Edited by Casey Bacon
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 8
There are no extravagant crowns or opulent jewels in the procession, but the parade of this monarch has endured longer than any other royal retinue in history. From Canada to Mexico and back again, the flame-colored Monarch butterflies spread like wildfire across the green forests of America through the winter and into the summer, following the warmer temperatures to ensure the next generation of their species.
But it’s not a straight fly-through for the insects; butterflies use several key layover points to rest and recuperate, and Maryland is one of the most significant for those making the trip along the United States’ eastern shore. Stopping here on their flight south and serving as one of the first habitats they stay at on their trip north, locations from Annapolis south are butterfly rest stops-- Point Lookout included. Yet, like so many other species, the last decade has shown that this extensive rule of the Monarch may be in ecological peril.
While it takes a single generation to travel down to Mexico, where the butterflies’ eggs hatch, it’s the butterfly’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren who make the return to Canada in the spring and summer months. It’s not that the southbound butterflies travel any faster, but rather that they live for so much longer; whereas a normal monarch generation lives for two to six weeks, this particular generation will live up to six months. This links back to reproduction: this last generation does not sexually mature immediately as adults, meaning they are not expending the energy to mate, and the cooler climates they’re resting in slow their metabolisms to gift with them longer lives.
To track these small, miraculous travelers, state parks and researchers around the country
tag the Monarchs as they land in these pass-over locations. Placing a small and location-specific sticker carefully underneath the wing (caution is key: damage to the wing in any way can result in premature death for a butterfly), scientists can trace the length and direction of the butterflies’ trip through each season.
Here in Southern Maryland, Point Lookout volunteers start the tagging process in September for the long-lived generation travelling south, and some of these tags have been found all the way down to their final destination in Mexico. Because Maryland rests at the border of where Monarchs are moving, some Monarchs making the journey north have been known to decide that Maryland is as far as they want to travel, so they will stay here for a few generations and catch the next generational move south when it passes through.
As pollinators for a variety of wildflowers in their journey across America and as a critical food source for species from spiders to birds like black-backed Oriole, scientists have long seen the Monarchs as a keystone species—that which the rest of the ecosystem is dependent upon. Milkweed is the necessary food source for these creatures, as well as their breeding ground, but that’s increasingly being wiped out by drought and development, serving as a death sentence to the migrating Monarchs; subsequently, this decline has dominoed to affect the other species who rely on them as a food source.
Natural conservation areas like Point Lookout have made efforts to cultivate milkweed and other wild grasses by allowing them to go uncut; while this has helped to nurture and attract some populations into the area, Monarchs are still struggling. Thanks to climate change, these heavily temperate- dependent insects’ migration patterns are being altered to include areas that they cannot survive in. The numbers of these losses are harrowing: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service has reported the disappearance of a billion butterflies between 1990 and 2015, a number that’s likely only grown from there. Conversely, climate change has been blending the Monarchs’ migration with that of birds unfamiliar and unadapted to the toxins in the butterflies’ bodies, leading to unnecessary losses on both sides.
And yet—Monarchs are some of the strongest climate converters, biologically wired to move following the ideal conditions that ensure they will survive another generation. How something so small and fragile can—and has—traveled at such lengths for (at least) thousands of years is nothing short of remarkable. Despite their grim role as the coal mine canary for climate change, scientists and admirers alike are elevating this threat as a call to action to do more and do better when it comes to protecting the natural species left on Earth. While only time will tell, it’s the Monarch’s exceptionality in adaptation that scientists and admirers are intently studying in the hopes that this reign will continue to grace Maryland and other flyover spots for a long time to come.
