A monarch butterfly sipping nectar from swamp milkweed.
Jim Hudgins/USFWS
While one of the most popular butterflies, the monarch isn’t the only species facing challenges to its survival across the West.
An effort began earlier this month to list the monarch as threatened, one step down from endangered.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there is a 95 percent chance that western monarchs will be extinct by 2080.
The service is seeking public comment on a proposal to list monarchs.
University of Nevada, Reno, Professor Matt Forister said the U.S. has never considered legal protections for an insect as wide-ranging as the monarch before.
He has been studying butterfly populations in Nevada and California for over a decade, according to the university.
“Many butterflies across the West are suffering,” he said. “The monarch will be a case study in figuring out how to protect a wide-ranging insect.”
There are more than 150 species of butterflies that aren’t monarchs that make their home in the Sierra Nevada.
At the beginning of the century, Forister said researchers believed that because those mountain butterflies lived away from agriculture and large populations of people, they would be more resilient in the face of changing climate.
That’s because the Sierra and other mountains provide several different climates depending on altitude and terrain.
Butterflies with issues in one spot might seek a more habitable clime either down the mountain, or on the other side.
But that doesn’t appear to be happening, with the numbers of butterflies declining a compounded 1-2 percent annually.
“Species in the mountains are declining more than we might have expected,” he said. “Imagine 20 years ago visiting some meadow in the mountains full of wildflowers, and imagine you were able to see 1,000 individual butterflies over the course of a day. Today that meadow would contain more like 725 individual butterflies. That’s a pretty severe decline.”
He said the decline includes mountains across the West.
He cited the 2011-15 megadrought as one factor that reduced the number of plants whose nectar butterflies consume and where they lay their eggs.
The big fires across California may have also contributed to the reduction in the number of butterflies.
But there are things private owners can do to make their property more habitable for monarchs and their cousins.
That includes using fewer pesticides and planting native vegetation in landscaping.
Residents often mistake California tortoise shell and painted ladies for monarchs.
“There are so many other species of butterflies in our mountains, and some of them are frequently miss-identified as monarchs,” he said. “I think this is in part because monarchs used to be more common in the West and we’re not used to these low numbers from recent years.”
He suggested people use iNaturalist to take pictures and upload photos of butterflies.
“If they only use it a couple of times a year, it’s real data,” he said. “The thing that’s unique about butterflies is that you can identify them from a picture.”
