Four Wings and a Prayer (16 page)

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
un
true.

“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.”

OK, he wasn’t just doing what everyone else was doing, but he was doing a lot of it. He had two toll-free numbers on which people could call in to report sightings of the tags he’d printed up. He had been down to Mexico a few times, and back and forth across the country, and once to Australia. He was genuinely interested in monarch butterflies, interested in what could only be called a scientific way. But he was not really interested in doing science. He refused to write up his findings; he had turned down a serious offer by Professor Adrian Wenner to coauthor a paper on California monarchs. He was not interested in “peer review,” even though he kept on putting out his ideas on D-Plex and watching the scientists knock him about. None of it—not Lincoln Brower’s hectoring, not Chip Taylor’s patient efforts at damage control each time Cherubini posted a message that contained controversial or erroneous information, not Sonia Altizer’s refutations or Bob Pyle’s passionate pleas—threw him off course. In the drama to which they were all, even Cherubini himself, contributors, Cherubini wanted desperately, earnestly, to play the bad guy. It was the one role in which he could distinguish himself.

“You know what I think? I think maybe they’re scared to death about what I’ll find out when I do these transfers. I think that maybe they’re scared I’ll show that California monarchs can get to El Rosario.” Cherubini laughed and looked gleeful.

“Actually,” he said, lowering his voice, “I already did that. A butterfly that I tagged in California and [that] was shipped
to Montana was found in Mexico in 1992. An eleven-year-old girl found it. And no one called to tell me. Whoever controls the logbook didn’t bother to let me know. I was wondering if the California monarchs would go to Mexico or fly back to California. They all went to Mexico. After that I found out that if you’re close to the Continental Divide they can go either way.

“Nobody knows that Montana monarch came from California. I didn’t tell anyone except my close friends. If people knew, they’d say, ‘He’s done it again. He’s threatened the migration,’ “ Paul Cherubini said, not unhappily.

S
TILL, NOT ALL
genetic mutation was “bad”—or, for that matter, “good.” More often than not the natural world remains outside the realm of moral values; questions of good and bad do not come into play. Even so, human behaviors have an inadvertent tendency to spill, like oil pumped with the bilge, beyond our own species. Of the thirteen kinds of butterflies found throughout the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, only two are native. The rest are immigrants whose ancestors arrived on hay bales and host plants imported by people. No one knows precisely how the monarch, one of these, got to the islands, or when, but by the mid–nineteenth century it was resident and common. Even more mysterious was the appearance of a rare genetic variant, a white monarch butterfly, at around the same time. Not an albino—that would be all white—but a monarch with its black markings intact and white where there should have been orange.

“The orange pigment is the end product of some metabolic pathway,” Dale Clayton, a biologist at Southwestern
Adventist University in Keene, Texas, told me, trying to explain how a monarch could become white—or at least not become orange. Clayton and his colleague Dan Petr, another Southwestern Adventist biologist, were the authors of the only field guide to Hawaiian butterflies and had probably seen more whites in the wild than anyone—and even that wasn’t many.

“I once chased a white monarch down the street in Honolulu. People must have thought I was crazy, running in and out of traffic,” Dan mentioned when we talked by phone, and the image of him dodging cars and trucks to get a glimpse of this exceptional creature made me want to see it, too. “If you can be at the road to South Point on the Big Island on January thirtieth early in the morning,” Petr offered, “we’ll try to find some whites.”

“M
ETABOLIC PATHWAYS MAY
have three or four or seven or ten or some number of intermediaries, and it takes specific enzymes to convert to the next intermediary,” Dale was saying. It was eight-fifteen in the morning on the penultimate day of January and we were sitting in the pair’s rental car, driving the South Point road at something under fifteen miles an hour. “If you have a genetic mutation, then that pathway doesn’t go to orange.” Dale did some calculations on a piece of paper and handed it over the front seat. I looked at the inscrutable symbols he had written down. It was the recipe for white monarch.

Dale also passed the road atlas. “This is where we are and this is where we are going,” he said, drawing his finger along the road to South Point. The two places were essentially the
same. “The road is twelve miles long,” Dan explained. “If we take it slow we’ll have a pretty good chance of finding a white monarch.” By then we had started to cruise the shoulder and I was finding it difficult to listen and look at the same time. Suddenly, without warning, Dan hit the brakes and we stopped short and Dale bailed out of the car, catapulted over a barbed-wire fence, and loped across an uncultivated, weedy field. All this happened without their exchanging more than three words: “Balloon plant,” Dan said. “Right,” Dale said, already pushing past the car door.

Balloon plant was a kind of milkweed common to Hawaii, and as Dale waded through it, a handful of monarchs rose up like dust underfoot. No whites, though. “This is like the fishing business,” Dan said to me as we watched Dale swipe his net a few times, then turn and trot back to the car. “Sometimes you catch ’em and sometimes you don’t.” This was one of those “don’t” times.

In another way, it was not slim pickings at all. As we moved slowly toward South Point, the southernmost tip of the United States, the biologists pointed out a gulf fritillary feeding on a passion vine, dozens of tiny bean butterflies, and the occasional banana skipper. Left and right, all along the road, there were doves and skylarks and grazing cows that spread across the scrubby, tree-bent pastureland as if this were the heartland, not the tropics. It was impossible not to sense the ocean, though, and to expect it, and there it was, finally, at the end of a rutted dirt track, the whole wide expanse of it. We stood there straining our eyes—not at the fishermen casting for pompano, but at the horizon and its promise, seventy-five hundred miles hence, of the next continental landfall: Antarctica.

Back in the car Dan vowed to drive even more slowly and to get out and walk more, for he and Dale were convinced that if we were going to see a white monarch, it was going to be here, on this road. It took us nearly an hour to travel eight miles, and during that time, Dale resumed his genetics lesson and Dan offered an abbreviated history of Hawaiian flora and fauna, which began with the arrival, two thousand years ago, of the Polynesians, bearing twenty-three kinds of plants; touched on the fact that of the forty-five thousand species of mammals in the world, only one, a bat, was native to Hawaii; and ended with the observation that there was little to be found in these islands that was indigenous, an observation that held true for the islands’ human populations as well. Although we were progressing, it felt as if we were going nowhere, and then, a little desperately, one of us suggested that we stop back at the field with the balloon plant and make a more thorough inventory. Our last chance. But before we could get there, Dan stopped the car short again and pointed to a different place, a hilly field that was home to a herd of cattle. “See the balloon plant?” he said, and this time we all spilled out of the car, nets drawn, like cops on the heels of a wily suspect.

“There!” Dale called. “There!” I saw a cloud of orange monarchs thirty feet away. Dale moved closer, walking on his toes. And then I saw it, too, a single white monarch needling in among and around the others. It was gorgeous, the way it pulled in the sunlight and sent it out again like a high beam. I followed it with my eyes and got dizzy. Dale, meanwhile, was moving with quiet dispatch through the knee-high grass. “Come out, come out, baby,” he called, and the white monarch heard and buzzed his head. Dale parried his net like a
lacrosse stick—once, twice, three times. “Got it!” he cried as Dan and I rushed up, congratulating him the whole way, and he pulled it out so we could admire it, which we did, again and again.

O
NCE
I
HAD SEEN
a white monarch aloft against the blue sky, I let the Hawaiian waters draw me in, sailing in a fifty-foot catamaran up the Kona coast toward Puako. The rugged beach there is often home to the Hawaiian green turtle, which feeds on algae growing in its shallow pools. It is not unusual to find the turtles asleep on the lava outcrop-pings or dug into the sand, and to mistake their profile for landscape. It was not possible, however, to mistake the gray whales off our starboard for anything. Migrants, they had come from Arctic waters to breed. “The juveniles gain about three thousand pounds in the three months they’re here,” said the boat’s captain. “The babies are said to grow by something like seven pounds an hour.”

Back on shore I went up to Puako to get a bearing on where I’d been. It was a lazy expedition, no agenda, and so I sat on the veranda of the Puako General Store eating lunch, aimlessly regarding a pair of cardinals and the occasional cabbage white butterfly—both North American imports, like me. Although I should have been trained by then, it took a while for my eyes to see that there was a hedge of crown flower milkweed not twenty feet in front of me, and monarchs nectaring on its blossoms. Entranced, I moved off the porch to get a better look. The trees were alive with butterflies. Continuing down the road, I spied more monarchs, and more crown flowers, and more monarchs. It occurred to me
that by now I must have seen thousands of monarch butterflies, and still they pulled me down the street as if they had my hand firmly in the grip of theirs. I stopped in front of a small gray house whose entire front lawn had been given over to a flower garden. The garden was teeming with monarchs, and one of them, I noticed, was white. I followed it around to the backyard, where I met the woman of the house, an eighty-seven-year-old native Hawaiian whose face and hands were as topographical as the carefully placed coral that studded her horseshoe beachfront. She was neither startled by my sudden appearance there nor unwelcoming. She pointed to the metal chair beside her on the veranda.