The monarch butterfly's extraordinary migration faces multiple threats including milkweed loss, pesticides, and climate change. Conservation action benefits billions of individual monarchs each year.
The monarch butterfly is a compelling conservation story with potential welfare dimensions. Each year, billions of individual monarchs undertake an extraordinary migration that requires specific habitat at every stage. The loss of milkweed from agricultural landscapes has caused population crashes that represent the deaths of enormous numbers of butterflies. Whether individual monarchs experience suffering during starvation, parasitism, or exposure is uncertain. What is clear is that the scale of population decline involves staggering numbers of individual animals whose survival capacity has been dramatically compromised by human activity. Milkweed restoration is one of the most concrete, effective conservation actions available.