Where the Wind Blows: Does wind speed affect overwintering monarchs?

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Guest Information

Kyle Nessen is a Biology instructor at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California. He has a masters of science in biology from California Polytechnic State University where he studied impacts of wind and forest structure on monarchs in their overwintering habitat.

Show Notes & Links

In this episode, we dive into the migratory and overwintering behaviors of Western monarch butterflies. Kyle Nessen shares his research insights into the role of wind and sunlight at overwintering sites. Nessen discusses the methodologies used in his study, such as deploying drones and using infrared cameras, as well as the surprising findings that challenge traditional beliefs about wind thresholds. The conversation also touches on the conservation efforts influenced by this research and the potential future directions in monarch habitat management. The episode concludes with Nessen sharing his inspirations and aspirations in the field of monarch butterfly conservation.

Episode image credit: Ray Danner at Althouse and Meade, Inc.

Rachel: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society, where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work, go to xerces.org/give.

Matthew: Hello, I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: And I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: Monarch butterflies are known as long-distance travelers, flying hundreds or thousands of miles from summer breeding areas to overwintering sites. These sites, although small, are essential for the survival of monarchs. Monarch butterflies across the Western United States and into British Columbia migrate to California, where they shelter in tree groves scattered along the coast from Mendocino County to the Mexican border and further south. Beyond trees to roost in, what other features makes a grove good for monarchs? What more can we learn to help provide for their overwintering needs?

Matthew: To talk with us and help understand these questions, we are joined by Kyle Nessen. Kyle is a Biology instructor at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California. He has a Master of Science in Biology from California Polytechnic State University where he studied impacts of wind and forest structure on monarchs in their overwintering habitat.

Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter, Kyle!

Kyle: Thanks! It's great to be here.

Rachel: Yeah, we're excited to have you and talk about this very interesting topic. So before we dive into your research, can you give us the basics of overwintering habitat for western monarchs? Where do they overwinter, and why?

Kyle: Sure. Yeah, so to understand why monarchs overwinter, we first need to understand what they're doing in the spring and summer. So across North America, most of the continental U.S. really, there's a plant—milkweed—which is the obligate plant host for monarch butterflies. And during the spring and summer monarchs are reproducing on these plants as quickly as possible. They're living just a few weeks, like two to six weeks, and producing many generations during the warm months of spring and summer. But milkweed is not a plant that stays present on the landscape year-round. In the winter time, it completely disappears. And so this essential resource that monarch butterflies need to complete their lifecycle disappears. And so they've evolved this ability to retreat to these areas, that we call overwintering groves, that allow them to take shelter during these winter months. Not just to escape freezing temperatures that monarch butterflies cannot tolerate for long periods of time, but also just to wait out this part of the year where milkweed is no longer present.

Kyle: And so it's this really remarkable adaptation that monarchs do, because if you think of the eastern population, you could be born sometime in August as a caterpillar in Southern Canada, and you have to make it all the way down to Mexico where your overwintering grounds are. That's thousands of miles. A single butterfly will do this because a few things happen to the monarchs during the breeding time—the days start to get shorter in the fall, temperatures start to drop. Milkweed starts to senesce, or it starts to like die back, it gets lower in quality. And these three signals trigger a single gene hormone in the monarch butterflies that are being developed during that time. And that causes them to become these “super-monarchs”—they're physically much larger, they live much longer. The way I like to think about it—if you take a typical human 5' 8", 5' 10," lives about 80 years. That would be our like breeding butterfly. Imagine the great grandchildren of that person has this, quote, “super-monarch,” “superhuman” form. They're 10 feet tall, and they live a thousand years. Because these super-monarchs can live six to nine months, because they have to make this huge journey, hang out at these groves over the winter months, and then re-migrate back into these breeding grounds—they have to fly back to Southern Texas so they can restart this whole process all over again.

Kyle: So the overwintering stage of monarchs is this really critical point of their life history where all of the monarchs during that migration are concentrated in these like small areas. And for the eastern population, those east of the Rockies, they go to the mountains of Mexico. For our western population—which is what I study—they occur along the Pacific coast of California, like as far north as Humboldt, down into Baja—just like the very northern tip of Baja—mostly concentrating around Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo County, Monterey County—like the central part of California. And there, they're finding these forested groves that are immediately coastal—they seem to like areas that are right up against the coast. Typically non-native eucalyptus groves that were planted in the late 1800s because they're these large emergent forested areas. And that's where they hang out for the winter months. They'll arrive sometime in October. They'll leave in February, as late as March. And what they're doing there, we think, is trying to conserve energy and survive these winter months so that they can get the whole thing going again.

Matthew: You were part of the Westland Monarch Overwintering Sites Initiative. Can you tell us about that, and what role you played?

Kyle: Sure. Yeah, so when I entered that initiative, I was an environmental consultant. That's how I got into the monarch conservation world. Where I worked at Althouse & Meade, primarily under Dan Meade, who was a really well known and respected monarch biologist, particularly in Santa Barbara County. And there we worked on these like private projects where we got to advocate for the monarch butterfly as like a client, in a way. But it was really actually quite wonderful because we were able to balance the needs of the actual human client with the resource itself. And I was really impressed with how much weight monarchs had. Like we could really like swing the direction of the project based on like the habitat needs of monarch butterflies.

Kyle: And there I developed a method of simulating wind conditions at overwintering sites. So what we did is we would take 3D data, like I would use my drone, and I would fly over these sites, and I would create a reconstruction of that grove on the computer. And then subject it to what we would consider like typical or strong winter storms that we might experience at the location. And that would allow us to see how is the site operating right now in terms of wind protection? And then we would play with our restoration plans, like we would digitally move buildings, or add trees, allow them to grow to their mature heights. And then rerun those same conditions and see are we improving wind protection or not?

Kyle: I joined the initiative as a consultant, primarily, bringing this type of tool into our understanding because—as I'm sure we'll get into—which was the study of my thesis—is that wind was considered like the primary abiotic condition to manage for in these overwintering sites. We thought that wind, if it exceeded five miles per hour and butterflies experienced these like gusty strong winds, that they would find it no longer suitable, leave the site, potentially forever. And that was a risk to what we consider a very valuable and finite resource, which is these overwintering sites. There's only, like you mentioned, there's 400. We are discovering more every day, but—. They're primarily reliant on these large emergent trees that take at least 50 years to grow, probably closer to a hundred years. There's no amount of money you can spend to make a big tree, unfortunately. And so we, we have this bias towards trying to preserve these overwintering sites as much as possible. Because again, butterflies from all over Western U.S., collapse back to these sites. It's this critical resource that allows this annual migration to happen year after year.

Matthew: And you mentioned earlier that eucalyptus was one of the more important ones—dominant trees in many sites. And those were all planted 130 years ago, or something, so, as you say, you can't just miraculously create something new of that scale. Maybe you've already answered this, but how did wind become a focus of your study?

Kyle: Sure. Yeah, that is a funny story, so—let me back up. So I was a consultant, and I had this opportunity—. Because I have experience with drones, and a professor at Cal Poly SLO—where I got my master's degree—he reached out about helping jumpstart a drone program at Cal Poly, which used advanced sensors like LiDAR. When he emailed me about it, he wanted to meet, and I was like, “What does he want me for? And I was like, “Maybe he needs project ideas.” And then my—in a matter of hours, my head just started spinning, and I had all these like monarch projects I wanted to do. And in the course of two days, all of a sudden, I'm like on my way to starting a master's program. It was super fun. I got blessings from everybody, like advisors are saying, “yes,” and all these different things.

Kyle: And the original project was to do this wind simulation stuff. So in my consulting work, we produce these reports, but I really wanted to take it a step further and develop like a calibrated, verified wind model that we could use more broadly. But Emma, actually—Emma—asked me one time, she's like, “Well, do we know like if wind is actually a thing? Is that—are we sure about five miles per hour? Like maybe it is, maybe it's not.” And then the drone that I was supposed to use self-destructed, like on the landing field. It's a helicopter, it was supposed to go straight up, but it went straight forward, and it just exploded everywhere, and we didn't have a drone for 11 months. And so I needed a backup project, and miraculously this other source of funding emerged. And so that's how I got to the project that I ultimately did, which was asking the question: how do monarchs respond to strong wind events?

Matthew: And just for our listeners, Emma, who you mentioned, is Emma Pelton, who's on the staff here at Xerces. One of our monarch specialists. Yeah, you mentioned about winds and the five miles an hour. I assume that higher winds are a greater threat to monarchs. Are they?

Kyle: So the story with wind was in the early 1990s, particularly here in California—actually at Cal Poly SLO—a number of researchers started to get really interested in the question of: why do monarchs keep returning to these same groves? Why do they return often to the same trees, the same branches? It's very mysterious and interesting. Like these, again, butterflies from year to year at overwintering sites are separated by four to five generations. So it's not the same individuals, yet they're still landing on the same, quote, “solution” of where to roost or cluster within these groves. And the answer those researchers came up with is what we call the microclimate hypothesis, which says there is a series or a set of climatic factors that monarch butterflies are paying attention to. Things like temperature—they don't want to be too hot or too cold. Humidity—high humidity is important for them so they don't dry out too fast. The amount of sunlight they get. So there seems to be a Goldilocks amount of light where too much, [that] might be bad, but like too little also could be bad. And then finally, they hypothesized that wind was a really important factor.

Kyle: And Kingston Leong specifically did most of the work here, where he went out to groves and identified trees that had butterflies on them, and trees where butterflies did not use, measured the wind speeds at each of those locations, compared them, found that, sure enough, where butterflies were the wind speeds were much lower. And over 30, 35 years of conservation, this idea of five miles per hour as a threshold that was too great for butterflies emerged—even though that number was never explicitly tested in Kingston's original work. He actually never measured the wind speeds that high. And he did it at infrequent intervals, and never really during big storms. But it's become the thing to manage for.

Kyle: Like another project I worked on was at Elwood, another really important site, and that was primarily what we would focus on. And all of our analysis and restoration efforts was trying to manage for this particular wind speed of five miles per hour and trying to get it below that. That's what really motivated all that simulation work.

Matthew: Yeah, because five miles an hour, if you're just standing there, five-mile-an-hour wind doesn't feel particularly strong to a human.

Kyle: No.

Matthew: It's just, “Oh, that's a nice breeze.”

Kyle: Yeah.

Matthew: But apparently, too much for monarchs. Maybe.

Kyle: Maybe, yeah. Spoiler: that's not what I found, but—. Haha.

Matthew: Haha.

Rachel: Haha. So, diving into the methods of your research—I'm just so curious because I've seen photos of how you tested wind speed, and looked at monarchs, and the reactions. So first of all, what were the locations of your study and why did you choose those locations specifically?

Kyle: Yeah, so all of the equipment was set up at Vandenberg Space Force Space. There's a lot of really nice properties of doing a study at a military base. One is you have a single point of contact on who to work with. In this case it was Jessica Griffiths, who I've known a long time—she's really wonderful. Another great member of the monarch community. Also, because it's a secure facility, you can just leave out your equipment anywhere and have no risk of vandalism. And Vandenberg has 30 named overwintering sites, 12 of which are accessible year-round, and in a good year can be among some of the most productive in terms of numbers.

Rachel: And what tools did you use?

Kyle: I used trail cameras. So these are like consumer-grade cameras that you can deploy out in the world for like weeks to months at a time. I modified them slightly so that they saw only in near-infrared. So this is not like a heat signature, it's the wavelength just beyond red. And that has this nice property of when you take pictures of living plants, they appear very bright, and just by chance, butterflies appear very dark. And so it was a way to really enhance the contrast between butterflies and the vegetation. Because if you try to take—maybe you all have tried this before—but like taking photos of monarch clusters can be like a real challenge, especially in eucalyptus groves. The dull orange on the underside of the wings like matches really well with a dead eucalyptus leaf. Anyway, this like really like solved a lot of those problems for me.

Kyle: And then I put that camera in a wind meter. So a device that just recorded the wind speed every minute. I programmed the camera to take a picture every 30 minutes of the clusters. I put it on a pole to the height of the clusters themselves. They're hard to photograph and maybe easier to describe. They're these fiberglass telescoping poles that get to be 50 feet high. They're primarily made for ham radio operators—a way to like get your antenna really high up in the sky. They're these free-standing poles. I wasn't allowed to use anything in the ground greater than eight inches, because then you run into these like cultural resource issues. So I had these guidelines. These like free-standing 30-, 40-foot poles with a little bit of equipment at the top. They were really delightful to me to see in the field, like it was super fun. Maybe I could send you some photos if there are show notes, or anything like that. But basically that was it. So I just elevated this equipment to the height of the clusters, and I just watched them for as long as possible. And I deployed cameras on as many clusters as possible. And saw how they changed over time, and asked: does wind help us predict changes in abundance, or not?

Rachel: So what was the most challenging part of the study? Before we get into the results, did you run into any problems along the way?

Kyle: Oh yeah, of course. Every project is just a story of problems along the way. The biggest problem was we're just having record-low years of monarch butterflies. So my first year it was a pretty good year, it was 2023. I don't remember the exact count, but it was certainly above 250,000 across the state, probably closer to 300. And we had butterflies at Vandenberg and I was able to collect a lot of data. The problem was, it was my first time doing it. No one's ever put these big poles with cameras up there, so I was learning as I go. I was able to produce some information. And then the next year, 2024, I was much more prepared. I had equipment set up all over the place, like I had really refined my methods. I was ready to go at 10 different sites, and the butterflies never showed up. It was the second lowest year ever recorded in 2024. So to give some context for listeners if they don't already know, like monarchs in the West, in the eighties, there were millions across the state. Now we're very happy to get over 200,000. 300,000 was considered more of a normal year. And in [2024] we had 9,000 total. And this year's also looking to be quite abysmal. Emphasizing the need for research like this for conservation purposes. So that, I think, was the biggest challenge—really that I just didn't have as much information as I could have given a normal year.

Matthew: That seems a little sad that you had everything set up and then the monarchs didn't turn up.

Kyle: The one like silver lining I will say, though, is that by taking this—and this is purely selfish, it only benefits me—but I really dug a hole for myself with this methodology. Because I produced like copious amounts of photos. I think it was like 60,000 images that needed to be dealt with in some way. And I didn't want to use AI because we would have to create a training data set. So I had four wonderful undergrads. And I think if it was a good year in 2024, I would still be going through those images. I would still be working on the data collection.

Matthew: Did you have to actually look at each one and go, “Yep, monarch,” or did you have to count the number of monarchs in each photo?

Kyle: It—depending how you look at it, it may be worse. So I came up with this new way of counting them. Because it was not practical to simply just look at an image and say, “There's 342 butterflies there.” So I divided the image into grids, and we classified each grid by order of magnitude. So are there no butterflies? Are there like a handful, like less than 10? 10 to a hundred? More than a hundred? That sort of thing. And so what it ended up becoming is I just created an endless stream of CAPTCHAs for my undergrads to do. Where it was just like, “Are you a robot?” Just like clicking forever and ever on these things. And that ultimately worked. It created like some artifacts in our stats, but I think it totally did the job. And was like this, I think, appropriate balance between effort and accuracy.

Matthew: Yeah. So sterling work by your undergrads proving they're not robots.

Kyle: Yeah.

Matthew: What were the final results? What did you find out from this?

Kyle: Yeah, so even with our limited amount of data—and I should bracket that with the qualification that we really only had observations from a couple groves, and from one season, and so we should be careful about generalizing too much. But even still, we found that there's really no relationship directly between wind and monarch change. So, we observed wind speed six times that threshold. So, two meters per second is the five mile per hour equivalent. We saw winds above 12 [meters per second]. Really no change from moment to moment. And we also looked across days. Again, no change. I think more telling was of all the observations where we had monarchs one day, and that cluster persisted to the next day—all of them had winds greater than five miles per hour. At least that was the minimum that they experienced and everything was above that. And so clearly monarchs can handle stronger winds than five miles per hour.

Matthew: It must have been exciting when you realized that. To have just flipped on its head, the accepted convention for wind speeds, and the ability of monarchs to handle them.

Kyle: Yeah, I think so. Because it is a rather restrictive constraint that we put on ourselves for managing habitat. I think getting closer to the first principles of what monarchs actually require is like certainly worth doing. Because if we're going too far, we might be not using our resources most effectively.

Matthew: Yeah. Obviously, you've talked about wind speed. Were you measuring wind direction in any way? Or was the wind speed the one factor?

Kyle: We did not measure wind direction. That gets complicated with the structure of the grove, and so for simplicity, we left that out. And really the predictions of the microclimate hypothesis don't require a directionality to it. It's really: what winds are they experiencing? But we did measure another attribute that was helpful in explaining their behavior. And that was exposure to direct sunlight. So while we were processing the imagery, we would see—because it's essentially a time lapse. You can watch the progression of what monarchs are doing over the course of the day, over many days—and you would see this morning sunlight come through and pass across these clusters. And it, in some cases, would just erase the butterflies. There would be a nice large cluster, and if the winds were still, and it was like warm, those butterflies would be gone by the time that sunlight had passed across them.

Kyle: And so we also looked into that. And interestingly, wind does matter when you consider sunlight. And it's like a complicated relationship. But basically, the idea is if you have no wind and no light—all the butterflies are in shade the entire time—monarchs will increase in size at those locations. If you keep the wind very low, but add a lot of sunlight, butterflies will leave very strongly from those locations. And if you have some mix of both, so if you have sunlight and some strong wind, let's say 10 miles per hour, butterflies are actually growing in those areas. They're not leaving, there's more arriving under conditions like that. That was a real surprise for me and a lot of other people I've shown this research to.

Matthew: So it may be as simple as the wind acts as a, like a cooling fan when the conditions are warmer.

Kyle: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I speculated in my discussion, that maybe thermoregulation is a better way of thinking about monarchs and what they're responding to. And so if you have this warming force of direct solar radiation, and as you say, like wind is blowing on them, creating this convective cooling, maybe there's some happy middle ground there that the butterflies seem to like.

Matthew: I've heard and I've read that it seems like typically when we think of hibernation over winter, and we think of some—of an animal hiding from the cold weather. But monarchs seem to go to cooler conditions, but not necessarily cold. It, yeah, makes sense that the combination, the interaction between wind and sun would just provide the conditions they like, and it gets too warm, they move.

Kyle: There's a thought there that I think's worth like emphasizing, is that because they're endotherms, they don't regulate their body temperature internally. They use the environment to regulate their body temperature. They have this nonlinear relationship with metabolism and their body temperature. But what I mean by that is monarchs arrive to these groves. They have a certain amount of energy reserves in terms of lipids, or fats, and they need to make that energy reserve last as much as possible, because their opportunities to nectar is limited during the winter. And so by keeping their body temperature fairly cool, they can really increase that efficiency. Like the difference between a few degrees Celsius at the low end is like very minimal. But as you get on that higher end, you have these like multiplications. It's like a, kind of like exponential curve in terms of you think of like body temperature down here, and like energy use here—it like shoots off into the sky if they get too hot.

Kyle: So they're really incentivized to keep their body temperature as cool as possible. But also, try not to get too cool because they have this like, this concept we call the flight threshold. So if they're below a certain temperature, about 55 degrees Celsius, they can't physically get their muscles to flap and fly. They need to warm up. And they can do one of two things. They can either open their wings and sun themselves—use their wings as like solar panels—and that's superefficient. They can get up to flight threshold in a matter of minutes with direct sunlight. Or in extreme cases, they can shiver. Which is [when] they make tiny little movements with their wings, and that will create their own energy. But that's 30 times more expensive than just using the sun. And so that's why we think sunlight is like a really good—. Another—. That's what I think, anyway. That sunlight's the next thing to look at. Because having too much, you get too hot, and you'll probably wanna leave. But having none, you don't get this opportunity to have these bursts of sunlight so that you can reach that flight threshold, and make decisions about where to be, and move around, which seems to be an advantage for the monarchs.

Matthew: Wow, this is thought provoking. I love sitting down with people and having these kind of conversations. The combination of light and wind is what would make a tree, or a grove acceptable to a monarch—provide the right condition. So as it shifts, do the monarchs move around within a grove, or do they just give up completely on a grove if the conditions are bad?

Kyle: I don't think we know the answer to this. Actually, the work Xerces is doing right now with a bunch of other collaborators is really shedding a lot of light on this with these Bluetooth tags on monarch butterflies. I am—I've only—I'm like at a glancing involvement with this, but it's been super exciting to see where—. To explain it very quickly, there are these tiny little tags. They have a little solar panel, and when sunlight hits those panels, they emit a Bluetooth signal. And it's like a unique name. And any device, like any cell phone—iOS or Android—can detect that signal and report it back to this database. And I feel weird like promoting this thing, but it's so cool! Because if you go download Project Monarch, you can see all these butterfly movements all across the United States. The eastern folks have been working on this in summer. In the West, we're just now getting started with our overwintering butterflies. And we're seeing a lot more movement than we would've expected. It's really, I think, a revolution for monarch science right now, that we can track these butterflies and see their movement across groves. I'm certainly already learning a ton. We always, I think, speculated that these butterflies are treating these nearby groves as like a sort of complex, but now we're getting like the hard evidence for it.

Kyle: And there's other butterflies that are doing very surprising things like ML004, which left Santa Cruz, made its way down the Salinas Valley, hopped over Big Sur, and then ended up in Cambria. And we've lost track of it now, but it's just amazing to see what these butterflies are doing at this level. And that was one of the, I think the insights of my project was we learned so much just by watching the butterflies, like at a higher frequency. And I think that's what these tags are gonna do for us, as well. It'll be great to see over this season, and hopefully many more seasons, what we learn.

Matthew: Yeah, because the tagging used to be—well, still is—you put a sticker on a wing and hope someone can read the code from it at some point. So the technology now giving you the ability to follow the daily movements of individual butterflies is really quite amazing. There's that element, but also your studies looking at wind speeds, and the influence of wind upon monarch clusterings. Do you feel, at this point, that these results of your study have been aiding in conservation efforts?

Kyle: I think it's pretty early to tell. Like I just got the email yesterday that my degree has been conferred, so, like it's—. Haha.

Matthew: Congratulations!

Kyle: Thank you. Haha. I made it! I did it!

Matthew: Woohoo!

Kyle: Yeah. So we're planning to publish the paper as soon as possible. Certainly, hopefully before the end of 2026. But I think it's started some discussions about what we should be doing differently. But the truth is like there's still a lot to study and learn.

Rachel: So you may have already answered this, or given us a little bit of a hint, but you were recently out in the field with our staff—Emma told me she just saw you. What are you working on now?

Kyle: Yeah, that was great to see all this monarch tagging happen in person. Now I am mid-career shift towards a teaching career at Questa College, and that's taking a fair bit of time. But I am thinking about the next things to work on for monarchs. So I've hinted at this a bit, but the conclusion of my study—at least for me [it] was—is that light is much more predictive of where monarchs will cluster within a grove. And the reason I feel this way is one: that wind is shown to be like not really the predictor that we once thought it was. And that also makes sense, like it's hard to know where the wind is gonna come from, and like how strong. The fact that I have to fly a LiDAR drone, and use like expensive computers, and a lot of compute time to try to get a handle on that, I think that's beyond the scope of a butterfly, generally. But light—light is something that's very easy to simulate and understand. It's very predictable. We know monarchs have really well-developed vision senses. And the concept of the canopy creating structure, and creating a pattern of light at different locations within the grove, that is a very stable feature from year to year. Like trees grow quite slowly. Like the structure of a canopy is gonna be basically the same from one year to the next. Unless there's some catastrophic change, like a tree falls, which we do see monarchs respond to basically immediately. Like if a tree falls, or like trees are cut down, there are a lot of anecdotal stories about monarchs no longer using that site.

Kyle: So what I would really love to do next is visit a bunch of these different groves, use some pretty well-established methodologies, like hemispherical photography, to identify locations where monarchs are using the spot, random spots where they don't, see if there's any pattern to light. Is there something in the canopy that is telling the butterflies where it's suitable or not? And if that does produce some interesting insights, I think that'd be a really powerful tool for conservation, because there's this constant tension with land managers who want to maintain the grove as best they can, and oftentimes that means trimming trees. Because there's this—there's another tension, right? Like we live very close to monarchs, and we need these places to be safe. There's threat to human life, also human property. And so how do we manage the tension between what's good for monarchs and what's good for people? And if light proves to be predictive, impactful, and we can say like, “Oh, this—you can remove this branch. It's not gonna change the light pattern in a meaningful way.” That's really powerful tool, and can help us make better decisions for overwintering sites.

Rachel: I appreciate that insight into land management. It's so much more complicated than people think. It's more than just, “Well just keep the trees there.” It's, yeah, like you said, there's many user groups. And you're living among the monarchs. I mean, they're next door to some people, or in their backyard, so. At a military base. We need to learn to find that balance, and that research is really key to doing that.

Kyle: Yeah. And if I could just add one like thought to that. The majority of overwintering groves are eucalyptus sites. These are not natural systems. These are like essentially abandoned crops by people in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It's, in my mind, like a funny accident or coincidence that monarchs seem to use it so well, because here's this like beloved insect by millions of people, monarchs, using this tree that is like mostly hated by people in California. And I think that's very funny for a lot of reasons. But the point I'm trying to make is that many people come to this idea that, “Oh, this is a natural system, and just let nature take its course, and everything will be fine.” And that's really not the case. This is a system that was put in by people, and it is going to decay into it's like natural state. But if we want to continue to function as a grove for monarch butterflies, it will require some input from us.

Matthew: The other thing that I sometimes ponder is the fact that our knowledge of monarchs is over a relatively short period of time. Certainly a shorter period of time than the age of those eucalyptus trees. And so it's like we have this image now of what a grove could be, the conditions, but the monarchs know better than us. And so we're, as you say, we're living in an artificial environment. One that definitely needs to be cared for and managed for lots of different reasons. But for sure, to try and make sure that we have sustainable conditions for monarch butterflies to overwinter.

Kyle: They sure do know better than us. I wish I could talk to them. It'd be so satisfying. “What are you looking for?” Haha. You know, “What is it that you need?”

Rachel: We had Rich Hatfield on—one of our bumble bee specialists on staff who runs the Atlas program—and he—I asked him, “If you could either talk to a conservationist, like any conservationist living or dead, or a bumble bee, what would you choose?” And he chose a bumble bee. And ever since I asked him that question, I thought, “If only we could talk to these animals we would know so much more.” And also, it would be just really cool. So it leaves all these mysteries for us, as biologists, to figure out. But yeah, I always thought about that question. So I know your answer, Kyle. You would talk to a monarch. Haha.

Kyle: Oh my gosh. Every day. Yeah. I could spend two years of my life setting up all this equipment, or just like, “How do you feel about wind? Do you like a little breeze?”

Matthew: There wouldn't be much of a journal paper to publish from that, though would there?

Kyle: Really? I think that can make Nature. Like, I talked to a monarch and learned something true.

Matthew: Yeah, that would be very cool, wouldn't it?

Kyle: Yeah.

Matthew: Well, Kyle, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure, and so fascinating, as well. As we were coming into this, in fact, when I chatted with Emma a few minutes before we started, I was like, “I know so little about what Kyle's talking about.” So I was looking forward to learning a great deal, and I certainly have. So thank you for sharing your knowledge, and the information about what you're working on. So, it's been great. We always wrap up our podcast with a couple of fairly standard questions, and so the first one I'm gonna ask you is: what inspired you to study monarchs?

Kyle: That's a great question. It was Dan Meade actually—so my boss at the consulting firm. He brought me onto one of those projects that I hinted at to fly the drone—I wasn't really involved in the monarchs at all. And he just—. It was me, Dan, Caris, another member of the monarch community. And he just started to explain to me that the mystery of monarchs, and how they like use these sites, and how it's still not totally known. And I just was immediately like hooked. I was like, “Oh, I think I could get to the bottom of this.” And I've just been going deeper and deeper ever since. And it's been super wonderful to be working on the system that so many people really care about. And also just like keeps giving in terms of like intellectual curiosity. Monarchs are particularly rich, I think, in the scale and scope of the mysteries they contain.

Rachel: Definitely. I love when I hear that a person inspired another person. Like we don't, I think, sometimes recognize just how powerful our influence can be on people. So our last question—this one I'm curious about—if you could see any bug—bug being a very loose term for invertebrate—in the wild, what would it be and why?

Kyle: Okay, so the cop out, honorable mention is to see monarchs in Mexico. I haven't done that yet, and I would really love to see them in their full display, of course. I'd also like to see them in other parts of the world. So they do overwinter at a smaller scale in New Zealand and Australia, and I think that would also be very interesting. But that is not the spirit of the question, I think. So while I was doing my master's introduction, I was looking for other examples of insects that have some example of a wind threshold that they respond to, and one I came across was this darkling beetle and the dunes of Namibia. And they are very cute, small little beetles. What they do is they'll hide under the sand for most of the time, and when wind speeds get above 20 miles per hour, they'll emerge to forage. Because the wind is physically moving the sand and revealing detritus or little food particles, and so that's when it's good for them to forage. And so when I'm reading these papers, it was like, “Ah, this would be such like fun research.” Or maybe not actually, that I think about it. Getting blasted in the sand, on a dune. But I would love to get to that part of the world. There’re so many cool things to see over there. And so I would certainly go look for that beetle if I had the chance.

Rachel: That's awesome. I was imagining you laying in the sand, and having 20-mile-per-hour winds, and like sand just like pelting you in the face. I'm like, “I don't know if he actually would wanna go.” And—.

Kyle: Yeah, maybe not.

Rachel: Yeah, maybe just an experience. But yeah, thank you, Kyle, so much for your time today. It was very interesting. I love hearing and learning about monarchs. I feel like it's just this endless drove of information. And like you said, they're beloved. People love monarchs, and they're such an iconic species. And this, as we call, gateway bug into other insects that are also equally important that are not as well known, so, yeah. Thank you for being here. It was really a pleasure. And I do hope that you can continue on in the research and work that you wanna do.

Kyle: Cool. Thank you so much. This was a real blast. Appreciate it.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you.

Matthew: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-supported nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Matthew: If you are already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work, go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and show notes, go to xerces.org/bugbanter.