[Pollinator] Pacific Grove: It's time for the monarch count

[Matthew Shepherd]

FROM: Monterey Herald

http://www.montereyherald.com/environment-and-nature/20161121/pacific-grove-its-time-for-the-monarch-count



*Pacific Grove: It’s time for the monarch count*

By Sukee Bennett



Pacific Grove >> With deep concentration, they direct their gaze up the
trees that play host to slumbering butterflies, silently counting the
orange insects until they share their tally with neighboring volunteers.



As monarchs flock to the verdant groves along the Central Coast this time
of year, so do the volunteers and scientists, some of whom have been
counting them religiously for 20 years.



The Xerces Society Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, which is the oldest
and most robust assessment of wintering monarch in California, started Nov.
12 and runs through Dec. 4. It’s one of the many ways the Xerces Society,
an invertebrate conservation group, works together with government agencies
like U.S. Fish and Wildlife, nongovernmental organizations, scientists,
farmers and citizens to study and protect the charismatic monarch
butterfly, which has faced substantial declines in the past two decades.



“Monarchs are kind of the pandas of the insect world,” said Emma Pelton, a
conservation biologist at Xerces. “We have a lot of beautiful butterflies
here in America, but (the monarchs are) bigger and brighter.”



Pelton, who has been interested in interactions between agriculture and
wildlife for as long as she can remember, has been at Xerces for a little
over a year — just long enough to participate in last fall’s annual monarch
count. But scientists have been counting California’s wintering monarchs
since 1997, when biologists Dennis Frey, David Marriott and Mia Monroe
realized the species was declining.



Both longstanding and first-year volunteers spend four weeks, centralized
around Thanksgiving, scouring sites where monarchs are known to converge,
including the Monarch Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, Del Monte Avenue in
Monterey, the Moss Landing Middle School, the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, and
Moran Lake and Manresa State Beach in Santa Cruz, and Pismo Beach.
Volunteers count individual butterflies, pooling their results with other
volunteers to form an average.



“It’s a little bit of a guessing game, but that’s why we like to have
experienced counters mentor new counters,” Pelton said.



They also assess the habitat, taking note of which trees appear most
popular to butterflies and the availability of nectar-producing plants in
the area.



This year, Bill Henry, director of Groundswell Coastal Ecology, a Santa
Cruz-based organization that works on coastal advancements through
education and community-based work, is partnering with Xerces. Together,
they’re developing a management plan for the monarch grounds at the
Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz. Henry will also count the
butterflies in northern Santa Cruz with Samantha Marcum, a U.S. Fish and
Wildlife monarch butterfly coordinator.



Marcum, who is volunteering with Xerces for the first time, said, “Working
with the Xerces Society is a really positive experience. They’re really
good at bringing people together to preserve monarchs.”



And Henry believes Xerces and its partners have been fundamental in
gathering data needed to make well-informed decisions about preserving
monarchs, whose populations have declined 74 percent in the last 20 years
in California, according to Xerces scientists.



“The length of the data is starting to get longer, and so you’re able to
learn more about some of these patterns,” Henry said.



But counting western monarchs in their winter habitat doesn’t tell the
whole tale of their decline. To find out more, Xerces and U.S. Fish and
Wildlife have just begun exploring where milkweed grows and where western
monarchs breed.



“Those are some areas where we’re lacking information,” said Marcum.



Scientists already know that monarchs aren’t solely slumbering on the
Central Coast; they’re now breeding here, too.



“Year-round breeding is really new,” said Pelton, adding that the
phenomenon was most likely spurred by climate change and people planting
tropical milkweed.



Monarchs are lighter sleepers than other hibernators like bears; they
already move around in the winter months. And warmer winter temperatures,
associated with climate change, may be putting them in the mood early.



Tropical milkweed, which locals sometimes plant in an effort to help
monarchs, may provide habitat and sustenance for growing caterpillars. But
there are problems. Tropical milkweed isn’t native to the Central Coast.
And, as its name suggests, it grows like a weed.



“We don’t advocate people planting milkweed close to the coast,” Pelton
said, adding that cultivating native pollinator species is a much better
option.



People can plant tropical milkweed with some success in the Midwest, where
many eastern monarchs grow up. But California winters are too warm for the
milkweed to ever die back. The plants end up carrying diseases that spread
to the infantile insects eating them.



Western monarchs raised on tropical milkweed usually have high disease
loads, Pelton said. And they can transmit those diseases to healthy
monarchs.



But, despite the many threats they face, there’s a silver lining for
monarchs. Now, more than ever, communities are coming together to help the
species. The Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count is but one example.







­----------



Matthew Shepherd

Communications Director



[image: Xerces-logo-CMYK-email_Outlook]



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