The Monarch butterfly (3 of 3): Not a native to California?
Perhaps the iconic insect did not arrive on the West Coast until the mid-19th Century
In these times...
A sobering fact of living in this era of climate chaos and environmental degradation is that we will be witnesses to loss. It’s inevitable that the increasingly rapid rate of habitat disruption will lead to a significant shuffling of ecological communities, and in some cases the localized extinctions of various species of plant and animal, including insects. The functioning of regional ecosystems as we have known them is faltering and novel ones are emerging. We would do well to accept two truths about this situation.
First, that some processes underway have their own inertia and are beyond our ability to stop or even to slow; we can only attempt to mitigate their effects. For example, today’s warmer temperatures are the result of increased greenhouse gases such as CO2 emitted two decades ago. The effects of the pollution we are currently belching into the atmosphere will not take full effect until at least twenty years from now. That and other lag factors are locked in, and all we can do is hold on tight. Much as we might not like it, there’s no going back to what we knew (or believed we knew).
Second, what has been familiar to us was only ever one moment in a long history of constantly shifting relationships, ongoing movement, and adaptation: just one film cell in an endless reel. The ecosystems that European colonialists encountered in the western hemisphere were not “unchanging, orderly” places, having achieved some state of perfection and balance. Had Europeans never arrived and their catastrophic disruptions never been inflicted, these ecosystems would have continued to morph, the species within them to evolve. Five centuries, though a blink in geological time, would have brought about variations that we can only speculate about. Even the world of 1769 (the date after which species introductions to California are considered “invasive”), which is only 250 years ago, would not exist today as it did then had colonization never happened. Everything is always changing.
But Europeans arrived, found these beautiful butterflies who live in such a way, and basically assumed it had “always been this way” and therefore “this is how it should be.” Of course, scientists will tell you that they know this is not true—that Danaus plexippus as a species is only x million years old, and that the climate of Asclepias syriaca’s current range has only been suitable for x many thousand years, and that value statements containing words like “should” don’t belong in science, but—but—this idea of an “unchanging, orderly world” that’s made worse when it’s different, is deeply embedded in the mindset of the culture, and freeing oneself from it entails more than merely attempting to eliminate bias in scientific research (as important as that is).
So it is that most of the people debating Eucalyptus and Tropical Milkweed—anti-, pro- and neutral—have been assuming that these introduced species have affected Monarch populations by interceding on long-term relationships that the butterflies already had with native species as a native species themselves. However, there is another possibility: that the Monarch itself is recently arrived and has no prior relationship with the trees and herbaceous plants of California, either native or introduced. Ironically, the Monarch itself might be “invasive” as that term is defined in both invasion biology and ideology.
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