Four Wings and a Prayer Page 11

  THIS, IT TURNED OUT when I caught up with him in California, was Paul Cherubini’s point exactly: the monarch was a remarkably plastic creature, an opportunist able to deal with, and even exploit, what came its way; opportunism was the ultimate evolutionary adaptation. Cherubini, who sold agricultural pesticides for a living, was a provocateur in the monarch world, the one person who could be counted on to take the incendiary position—take it and let it roll among the other monarch enthusiasts as if it were a firecracker about to explode. Then, like a bad boy standing on the fringes, he looked with delight on their horror and revulsion. Lincoln Brower, who could often be found on-line sparring with him, liked to call Cherubini “the exterminator.”

  If Brower spoke for the butterflies from a preservationist’s point of view, Cherubini spoke for them from a developer’s perspective, though he wasn’t one. Rather, he was that rare species of naturalist who despised environmentalists. To him they were corrupt, money-grubbing elitists. He reminded me of some seasonal workers I knew who lived off unemployment for half the year but always voted for whichever candidate vowed to weed out welfare cheats. He was an angry white guy, the kind who always felt left out and disrespected, the kind whose anger—if anyone cared to notice—came from sadness, not from spite.

  “I grew up right around San Leandro,” Cherubini told me the day he and I went on a road trip together from Sacramento to the Bay Area, looking at the unlikely places monarchs had chosen to breed and roost. “I used to catch monarchs in wild fields, and I saw all these industrial parks coming in and crowding out everything, and there was one particular monarch site that only had five hundred monarchs and it got cut down and I said, ‘My God, what’s going to happen?’ And I read books like Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that said there was going to be world famine by the mid-1970s and I said ‘My God, I don’t have a future.’ And I got depressed, seriously depressed. And my parents were having marital problems and the psychiatrist wanted to interview me to get a sense about what their problems were but then he realized I had problems, too, and he said, ‘You’re depressed, why do you think you have no future?’ and I said, ‘Because these scientists have Ph.D.’s,’ and he said, ‘That’s not right, you’re paranoid,’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to come to you anymore, facts are facts, scientists are scientists.’

  “Then when I went to U.C. Davis I had a professor who was able to show me the structure of science and ideology, and also show the business side of science. He was able to show me that a large part of the environmental movement was based on business. I mean, Paul Ehrlich was worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars and had his own private airplane, all derived from those environmental books in addition to collecting his salary from Stanford. And suddenly I realized that especially in [places like] Ivy League colleges it’s a big-buck industry to say all this stuff. If you have a Ph.D. you can say the world’s oceans are dying and you don’t have to be accountable. You can get rich and not be accountable.”

  We were driving down a superhighway then, eight lanes across, jostled by the truck traffic as Cherubini kept his eyes low to the ground, looking for monarchs and milkweed in the median strips. They were there, though not in the concentrations he had hoped to show me, for the ground was dry and brown and the milkweed had died back. Still, monarchs would stray into his line of vision and he’d point them out as if they proved his point: habitat protection not only was unnecessary, it was a sham. “Some books, articles, and Web sites (including the Monarch Watch Web site) often state that California monarch overwintering sites are ‘threatened’ or ‘steadily disappearing’ due to real estate development and hence the western monarch migration is an ‘endangered phenomenon,’ “ Cherubini wrote on D-Plex around the time of my visit with him. “I think the evidence … from the most heavily urbanized areas of North America refutes that dogmatic interpretation of the situation.”

  “I don’t think there’s a limit to development,” he said when I asked. It was the obvious question. I didn’t think it was the obvious answer.

  “Look at Los Angeles,” he went on. “Look at an aerial photograph of Santa Monica and the area down to the airport. Every inch of land is taken up except for the golf courses. There’s no such thing as a vacant lot. Monarchs just have a ball there. They go into people’s yards in the daytime and drink the nectar. And especially when there’s a drought, they just love the water sprinklers.”

  It was a happy thought, all those butterflies flitting through all those oscillating sprinklers like little kids frolicking on a hot summer day. I could see how, if you believed in monarchs’ “having a ball,” it could be quite compelling. And that was not all, Paul was saying.

  “In Santa Barbara there is a huge Chevron oil and gas refinery and they have a monarch colony right on the property. It’s the largest aggregation in California. You can photograph monarchs right on their billowing smokestacks. When I saw that, I realized the whole idea of fumes’ being bad for monarchs was not right. People live to be eighty in downtown Los Angeles.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. People die from asthma in downtown Los Angeles, too. People have more respiratory problems in Mexico City than in Sioux City. Each of these facts said something—but what?

  We were headed for a couple of golf courses near the Bay Area, places that Paul Cherubini thought “broke all the rules” about overwintering habitat. To the north of them there were town houses, to the south the Hayward Airport, to the west the bay. The greens were triangulated in between, open and flat, shaded here and there by eucalyptus trees, especially along the fairways. There was no canopy, no understory, and some seaborne wind. It wasn’t like El Rosario, that was for sure. It wasn’t even like Natural Bridges State Park, down the coast in Santa Cruz, which, though on the beach, was densely wooded.

  “To my mind, if you had all this openness at ten thousand five hundred feet in El Rosario, you’d be flooded with monarchs,” Paul said as we dodged the golf balls that were zipping left and right.

  “But you’d never have this much open space, right?” I asked, gliding like a monarch toward a stand of eucalyptus where I hoped to find sanctuary from predatory Spauldings and Wilsons.

  “Well, they’ve never had the opportunity to develop anything like this,” he said, hustling alongside me.

  “But would you want to do that?” I asked. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I wouldn’t want to lie about it to prevent it from happening,” Paul said. “Tell the facts to the people and it’s their lives, their property, their decision.”

  “But there is no habitat in Mexico like this, is there?” I asked. The forests were at ten and eleven thousand feet. They were on the sides of steep mountains. It was not exactly prime golfing terrain.

  “No,” Paul Cherubini said as we wended through the trees, before making a break for the other side of the fairway. “But they haven’t had the opportunity.”

  WE WENT TO Jack-in-the-Box for lunch. Paul explained how low-fat foods were unhealthy but no one could say that out loud in public because to do so would be to take on a huge part of the economy. He mentioned that there was so little pesticide residue on apples that they didn’t need to be washed. He was concerned about nematodes, he said, but there was little to be done about them. He looked normal, but his ideas seemed a little off kilter, tending toward the second gunman/trilateral commission/Vince Foster conspiracy side of things. He talked about a sideline business he was involved in, collecting wild butterflies for commercial butterfly farms. He sold the monarchs for three dollars apiece; the “farmers” then turned around and sold them for ten dollars each. It was basically free money, and it was coming in fast. He was genuinely baffled when people on the D-Plex list took issue with his doing this; he was even hurt. (“I’m just doing what everyone else is doing,” he said. “This is what pays for Chip’s research.” But it wasn’t: Chip Taylor was sending out caterpillars to be raised, not butterflies to be released.) Cherubini held ideas like beliefs. Th
ey were matters of conviction, of faith, and seemed to come from a deep and personal place. They did not lend themselves easily to the tests of science, but then, as Lincoln Brower often pointed out, Paul Cherubini killed bugs for a living. In his line of work, science was about what did the job best.

  He did know a lot about monarchs, though. Cherubini had begun tagging with the Urquharts when he was twelve, and soon after that caught a monarch that had been tagged in Toronto and released in British Columbia. The tagger was another teenage boy. His name was Don Davis.

  “As soon as I caught Don Davis’s butterfly, I was hooked,” Paul said. “I knew it would be a lifelong interest in navigation. I said to myself, ‘I’m twelve. I have a head start on people who are starting to look at this when they’re thirty.’ I tagged a whole bunch for the Urquharts. They used to send Canadian monarchs to Reno and California to be released in September to see where they’d end up. I found four of them on the California coast. They were acting like West Coast monarchs.”

  This notion, that there were two distinct monarch populations in North America, had long been part of the monarch canon. Tagging data from some of the earliest days of the Insect Migration Association showed eastern migrants moving in a concerted southwesterly direction, with those breeding west of the Continental Divide moving westward in the winter, toward one or another of the two hundred or so coastal colonies that would form each year in the stands of Monterey pine and eucalyptus that fringed the Pacific. But in fact, as Bob Pyle and Adrian Wenner and others would show, western behavior was not nearly so neat. While a large number of monarchs west of the Rockies did escape the dry inland heat each year by flying to the coast, others in the northern quadrant moved southward, down the coast, from Washington State to California in the case of one butterfly tagged by Pyle. Still others, in the southern part of the range, actually appeared to move northward, on cooling Santa Ana winds, according to Wenner’s data. And to confuse things totally, some western monarchs near the Rockies appeared to head southeasterly, in the direction of El Rosario and Chincua. While the goal was always the same—to turn off reproduction, wait out the winter, and breed in the spring—the strategy was dynamic. As Bob Pyle would conclude in his book Chasing Monarchs, “The old model of the Continental Divide as a kind of Berlin Wall for monarchs is bankrupt.”

  Paul Cherubini knew this. He was convinced, having watched monarchs in Rocky Mountain National Park “flying all over the place,” that “there is no such thing as western monarchs and eastern monarchs.” But Cherubini was reckless with what he knew. As a kind of hobby, he would transfer butterflies from one part of the continent to the other, from an inland region to the coast, from North to South, from East to West, from the mountains to the plains, to see what they would do, arguing that these “experiments” would further disprove the East-West dichotomy. Although many lepidopterists, especially Lincoln Brower, worried about spreading diseases from one part of the continent to the other, as well as about mixing up genetic stocks, and were calling for a moratorium on such transfers, Cherubini was unmoved.

  Brower’s concern dated back to the early 1960s, when he had developed a way to “fingerprint” monarchs by using an assay test to analyze the cardenolide content of a butterfly’s guts. Cardenolide, the chemical that makes milkweed toxic, is found in varying concentrations in different species of milkweed. Brower had perfected a method that allowed him to determine which kind of milkweed a particular butterfly had ingested and, since these milkweeds grew in distinct regions, thereby to identify where each butterfly had come from. The monarchs he studied in the Neovolcanics, for instance, had all fed on milkweed growing only in the North. Those he tested up North in the spring showed evidence of having ranged in the South. A new test being developed by Canadian scientists reiterated these findings. Using hydrogen isotopes found in monarch wings, it could determine where the butterflies found at the Mexican overwintering sites had come from. With both tests, transferring butterflies from one region to another might queer the results, not because the tests wouldn’t work but because they would.

  “Lincoln Brower wrote a big paper on transfers a couple of years ago, about the potential for unknown diseases and for mixing up [the monarchs“] genetics,” Cherubini said, defending his position. “Lincoln also says you’re going to ruin the flight-record database because you are adding monarchs that wouldn’t otherwise be there that may be recorded by field biologists. But my argument is that it’s an unlikely mathematical probability that they’d have an encounter with those monarch butterflies.”

  The article Paul was referring to had been published a few years before in BioScience and was coauthored, along with Lincoln Brower, by almost every key monarch researcher in the United States. Chip Taylor’s name was there, and Karen Oberhauser’s and Bill Calvert’s. It carried so many names, it was like a petition. Bob Pyle’s was missing, but he, too, subscribed to the idea of a moratorium, presenting his own arguments on D-Plex and at the Lepidopterists’ Society and in the pages of the Monarch Project’s newsletter. Pyle lived up in Gray’s River, Washington, not a place overrun with monarch butterflies, though they were present on occasion. So the mathematical improbability that Paul Cherubini observed worked the other way around, too: the release of monarchs in exotic locales increased the chances of their being sighted where they “did not belong” and mistaken for local inhabitants or naturally occurring transients. Such “strangers” were confusing, and that confusion could be costly, both to the scientific record and to conservation efforts. “In particular,” Pyle noted, “northwestern monarch students are just beginning to get a sense of how they really behave up here, and a few thousand, even a few hundred, releases could seriously disrupt our ability to do so. This is the same problem that Professor Kenelm Philip, director of the Alaska Lepidoptera Survey, has with painted lady released in Alaska: rare natural events are obscured by artificial releases, so the opportunity is lost to explore how the natural phenomenon works.”

  Another natural phenomenon—one that scientists were at no loss to explore—was disease among monarchs, especially a protozoan spore named Ophryocystis electroscirrha, which was passed from monarch to monarch during breeding, egg laying, and roosting. Infected larvae suffered developmental defects and often died shortly after birth. Western monarchs appeared to be infected at a much higher rate than monarchs that bred and ranged east of the Rockies—30 percent versus 8 percent. It turned out, too, that the western parasite was much more virulent than the eastern one. It was a natural-born killer. All the more reason, according to Brower and Pyle and Sonia Altizer, then a Minnesota graduate student who had raided Brower’s stash of ten thousand frozen monarchs to do historical studies of parasite infestation, to keep eastern and western monarchs apart.

  But simply saying that there were distinct western and eastern populations posed a temptation for someone like Paul Cherubini. Even if calling them by those names meant only that they were geographically, not genetically, distinct, and even though genetic studies had shown that there was almost no difference between the mitochondrial DNA of a monarch from the West and that of one from the East (a rather surprising outcome, according to Chip Taylor, since vertebrates tended to “have differences at ten times this level, while other insects showed differences in mtDNA even within a population”). But their designation as eastern and western was a challenge to Cherubini because it was an assertion he thought he could “prove” wrong by taking a butterfly from Salinas, say, bringing it to Minnesota, and tracking its movements after that. In his BioScience collaboration Lincoln Brower had posited that eastern and western monarch populations faced different factors during the long winter months, and different struggles when migrating and dispersing in the spring. It was possible, he suggested, that they had different biological responses, too—responses that had some as-yet-undiscovered physiological basis. He worried that mixing up monarchs from the East with monarchs from the West would impair scientists’ ability to figure out if this was true.
It might even make it untrue.

  “Two purposes have been stated for the current round of butterfly transfers,” Brower and his colleagues wrote. “ ‘To determine how California monarchs behave east of the continental divide’ (Cherubini, 1994) and to determine if the direction of migration is ‘innate … or determined directly by the butterflies from stimuli perceived in the external environment of the release location itself’ (Cherubini, 1995). The first question has already been answered by the Urquharts’ transfers. Monarchs captured at Muir Beach, California, and released in North Dakota flew south and were recaptured in Nebraska and Kansas (Urquhart and Urquhart, 1974). The second question, unraveling the influences of genetic and environmental factors on monarch orientation and navigation, is more complex. It is not clear how our understanding is to be advanced by haphazard transfers, which lack a carefully designed protocol and are unrelated to any laboratory experiments.”

  So it was back to that. There were some on the D-Plex list who thought the scientists were ganging up on Paul Cherubini and whipping him around with their degrees, bullying him into a version of science to which he didn’t subscribe. The commercial breeders in particular were aggrieved on his behalf, but they tended to lurk at the margins since their activities were even more reviled than Cherubini’s own transfer “experiments.” They were entomology’s lowlifes, people who treated butterflies as—in Bob Pyle’s disparaging phrase—“biodegradable balloons.” And now Cherubini had joined their ranks, picking off chrysalids wherever he could find them, hatching out the butterflies and selling them fresh to breeders. The back of his truck was crowded with cages, and the cages were crowded with small green envelopes that swayed like lanterns in the breeze. “I swear to God I put about thirty thousand dollars into monarch research, and this is the first time I’m actually getting something to pay for it,” he said. “I’m just doing what everybody else is doing.”