| Recorded at | December 04, 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event | TEDWomen 2019 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 11:43 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 182.55 fast |
| Readability (FK) | 49.49 difficult |
| Speaker | Mary Ellen Hannibal |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Monarch butterflies are dying at an alarming rate around the world -- a looming extinction that could also put human life at risk. But we have just the thing to help save these insects, says author Mary Ellen Hannibal: citizen scientists. Learn how these grassroots volunteers are playing a crucial role in measuring and rescuing the monarch's dwindling population -- and how you could join their ranks to help protect nature. (You'll be in good company: Charles Darwin was a citizen scientist!)
| 1 | 00:13 | Hi there. | ||
| 2 | 00:14 | I'm in the habit of saying I would like it if butterflies could talk, | ||
| 3 | 00:18 | but I've been recently reconsidering that, | ||
| 4 | 00:20 | because we already have a pretty loud world. | ||
| 5 | 00:23 | Can you imagine if butterflies were yakking out there all over the place? | ||
| 6 | 00:27 | But I would like to ask butterflies one question, which is, | ||
| 7 | 00:30 | what is the meaning of some of the stories that we humans tell about them? | ||
| 8 | 00:36 | Because remarkably, all over the world, cultures have really similar stories, | ||
| 9 | 00:40 | similar mythologies about butterflies having to do with the human soul. | ||
| 10 | 00:44 | Some cultures tell us butterflies are carrying the souls of children | ||
| 11 | 00:48 | who have died wrongly or too soon, | ||
| 12 | 00:51 | and other cultures tell us that butterflies | ||
| 13 | 00:53 | are carrying the souls of our ancestors among us. | ||
| 14 | 00:56 | This butterfly is called a Kallima inachus. | ||
| 15 | 01:00 | On one side, it looks like a beautiful butterfly, | ||
| 16 | 01:02 | and on the other side, it looks like a leaf, | ||
| 17 | 01:04 | and it folds up like a leaf to elude predators. | ||
| 18 | 01:07 | So now you see it, now you don't, | ||
| 19 | 01:08 | something hidden, something revealed. | ||
| 20 | 01:10 | Maybe we got our ideas about the human soul from this butterfly. | ||
| 21 | 01:14 | So it's possible that butterflies have some sort of outsized role | ||
| 22 | 01:19 | in our afterlife. | ||
| 23 | 01:20 | But in this life, in this world, butterflies are in really serious trouble. | ||
| 24 | 01:26 | This is a moth. | ||
| 25 | 01:27 | Moths and butterflies are related. Moths generally fly at night. | ||
| 26 | 01:30 | This is called "praedicta," because Darwin predicted that it must exist. | ||
| 27 | 01:36 | So today, more than 60 species of butterflies are endangered | ||
| 28 | 01:41 | around the world, | ||
| 29 | 01:42 | but even more than that, | ||
| 30 | 01:43 | insects are declining, declining, declining. | ||
| 31 | 01:46 | In the last 50 years, | ||
| 32 | 01:48 | we've lost nearly 50 percent of the total number of bodies of insects. | ||
| 33 | 01:52 | Now this is a disaster. | ||
| 34 | 01:55 | It could impact us in a more serious way more quickly than climate change, | ||
| 35 | 01:59 | because butterflies don't do that much in the ecosystem that we depend on, | ||
| 36 | 02:05 | but they do things for other creatures that we do depend on, | ||
| 37 | 02:08 | and that's the same story with all insect life. | ||
| 38 | 02:11 | Insect life is at the very foundation of our life-support systems. | ||
| 39 | 02:15 | We can't lose these insects. | ||
| 40 | 02:18 | Biodiversity all over the globe is in a vast decline. | ||
| 41 | 02:22 | Habitat loss, pesticides, herbicides and impacts of climate change. | ||
| 42 | 02:28 | Habitat loss is very serious, | ||
| 43 | 02:30 | and that's where we really have to get developing better, | ||
| 44 | 02:33 | more mindfully. | ||
| 45 | 02:37 | It's the worst of times, | ||
| 46 | 02:38 | we are kind of overloaded with our problems. | ||
| 47 | 02:41 | It's also the best of times -- there's incredibly good news. | ||
| 48 | 02:44 | We have exactly what we need. | ||
| 49 | 02:46 | We have exactly the platform to save nature. | ||
| 50 | 02:49 | It's called citizen science. | ||
| 51 | 02:51 | So citizen science is generally a term used to mean people without a PhD | ||
| 52 | 02:55 | contributing to scientific research. | ||
| 53 | 02:57 | Sometimes, it's called community science, | ||
| 54 | 02:59 | which gets at the communal purpose of citizen science, | ||
| 55 | 03:03 | which is to do something for our commons together. | ||
| 56 | 03:06 | It's amateur science. | ||
| 57 | 03:08 | It's being turbocharged today by vast computing power, | ||
| 58 | 03:11 | statistical analysis and the smartphone, | ||
| 59 | 03:14 | but it's an ancient practice that people have always practiced. | ||
| 60 | 03:17 | It's amateur science. | ||
| 61 | 03:19 | Professional science has its roots in amateur science. | ||
| 62 | 03:23 | Charles Darwin was a citizen scientist. | ||
| 63 | 03:25 | He had no advanced degree, and he worked only for himself. | ||
| 64 | 03:29 | So someone showed Darwin this Madagascar star orchid, | ||
| 65 | 03:33 | which as a spur that's 12 inches long, | ||
| 66 | 03:36 | and the spur is the part of a flower that the nectar is in. | ||
| 67 | 03:40 | So this person showed this to Darwin and said, | ||
| 68 | 03:42 | "This proves that evolution does not come about in a natural way. | ||
| 69 | 03:47 | This flower proves that only God can make these incredibly bizarre | ||
| 70 | 03:53 | and tricky-looking creatures on the earth, | ||
| 71 | 03:56 | because no insect could possibly pollinate this. | ||
| 72 | 03:59 | God must reproduce it." | ||
| 73 | 04:01 | And Darwin said, "No, I'm sure that there is an insect somewhere | ||
| 74 | 04:06 | with a proboscis long enough to pollinate that star orchid." | ||
| 75 | 04:10 | And he was right. | ||
| 76 | 04:13 | This is a map of the monarch butterfly. | ||
| 77 | 04:17 | So, the monarch butterfly has a different story | ||
| 78 | 04:20 | than that particular moth, | ||
| 79 | 04:21 | but reflects the same kind of fundamental idea that Darwin had | ||
| 80 | 04:27 | called coevolution, | ||
| 81 | 04:28 | and coevolution is at the heart of how nature works, | ||
| 82 | 04:31 | and it's also at the heart of what's going wrong with nature today. | ||
| 83 | 04:35 | So over time, as the moth developed a longer proboscis, | ||
| 84 | 04:40 | so the plant developed a longer spur. | ||
| 85 | 04:43 | Over millions of years, | ||
| 86 | 04:44 | the plant and the moth developed a relationship | ||
| 87 | 04:47 | whereby they both make each other's chances of existence better. | ||
| 88 | 04:53 | The monarch butterfly has a different kind of coevolutionary relationship, | ||
| 89 | 04:57 | and today, it is at the heart of what's going wrong | ||
| 90 | 04:59 | for the monarch butterfly. | ||
| 91 | 05:00 | So this is a map of the monarch butterfly migration. | ||
| 92 | 05:03 | The monarch does this amazing thing, | ||
| 93 | 05:05 | and over the course of a year, | ||
| 94 | 05:07 | it goes over the entirety of North America. | ||
| 95 | 05:10 | It does this in four or five generations. | ||
| 96 | 05:13 | The first generations only live a couple of weeks. | ||
| 97 | 05:16 | They mate, they lay eggs and they die. | ||
| 98 | 05:19 | The next generation emerges as butterflies and takes the next leg of the journey. | ||
| 99 | 05:24 | Nobody knows how they do it. | ||
| 100 | 05:25 | By the time the fifth generation comes back around -- and that one lives longer, | ||
| 101 | 05:29 | they overwinter in Mexico and California -- | ||
| 102 | 05:32 | by the time it gets there, | ||
| 103 | 05:34 | those butterflies are going back to where their ancestors came from, | ||
| 104 | 05:37 | but they've never been there before, | ||
| 105 | 05:39 | and nobody that they're immediately related to has been there before either. | ||
| 106 | 05:43 | We don't know how they do it. | ||
| 107 | 05:46 | The reason we know they do this kind of migration -- | ||
| 108 | 05:49 | and we still have a lot of unanswered questions | ||
| 109 | 05:51 | about the monarch migration -- | ||
| 110 | 05:53 | is because of citizen science. | ||
| 111 | 05:54 | So for decades, people have made observations | ||
| 112 | 05:57 | about monarch butterflies, where and when they see them, | ||
| 113 | 06:00 | and they've contributed these observations to platforms like Journey North. | ||
| 114 | 06:06 | This is a map of some observations of butterflies given to Journey North. | ||
| 115 | 06:13 | And if you can see the dots are coded | ||
| 116 | 06:15 | by what time of year those observations were made. | ||
| 117 | 06:19 | So these massive amounts of data come into a place like Journey North, | ||
| 118 | 06:23 | and they can create a map of this time of over a course of a year | ||
| 119 | 06:29 | of where monarchs go. | ||
| 120 | 06:31 | Also because of citizen science, | ||
| 121 | 06:33 | we understand that monarch butterfly numbers are going down, down, down. | ||
| 122 | 06:36 | So in the 1980s, the overwintering butterflies here in California, | ||
| 123 | 06:40 | there were four million counted. | ||
| 124 | 06:42 | Last year, 30,000. | ||
| 125 | 06:44 | (Audience gasps) | ||
| 126 | 06:45 | Four million to 30,000 since the 1980s. | ||
| 127 | 06:49 | The monarchs on the east coast are doing a little better, | ||
| 128 | 06:51 | but they're also going down. | ||
| 129 | 06:53 | OK, so what are we going to do about it? | ||
| 130 | 06:55 | Well, very organically, nobody really asking anybody to do it, | ||
| 131 | 06:59 | people all over the continent are supporting monarch butterflies. | ||
| 132 | 07:04 | The heart of the problem for monarchs is milkweed. | ||
| 133 | 07:07 | It's another coevolutionary relationship, and here's the story. | ||
| 134 | 07:10 | Milkweed is toxic. | ||
| 135 | 07:13 | It has a poison in it that it evolved to deter other insects from eating it, | ||
| 136 | 07:18 | but the monarch developed a different kind of relationship, | ||
| 137 | 07:21 | a different strategy with the milkweed. | ||
| 138 | 07:23 | Not only does it tolerate the toxin, | ||
| 139 | 07:25 | the monarch actually sequesters the toxin in its body, | ||
| 140 | 07:29 | thus becoming poisonous to its predators. | ||
| 141 | 07:33 | Monarch butterflies will only lay their eggs on milkweed, | ||
| 142 | 07:36 | and monarch caterpillars will only eat milkweed, | ||
| 143 | 07:39 | because they need that toxin to actually create what they are as a species. | ||
| 144 | 07:46 | So people are planting milkweed all over the country | ||
| 145 | 07:49 | where we have lost milkweed due to habitat destruction, | ||
| 146 | 07:52 | pesticide use, herbicide use and climate change impacts. | ||
| 147 | 07:57 | You can create a lot of butterfly habitat and pollinator habitat on a windowsill. | ||
| 148 | 08:02 | You go to a native nursery in your area | ||
| 149 | 08:05 | and find out what's native to where you live, | ||
| 150 | 08:07 | and you will bring beautiful things to yourself. | ||
| 151 | 08:09 | Now, citizen science can do even more than rescue monarch butterflies. | ||
| 152 | 08:14 | It has the capacity to scale | ||
| 153 | 08:17 | to the level necessary that we need to mobilize to save nature. | ||
| 154 | 08:21 | And this is an example. | ||
| 155 | 08:23 | It's called City Nature Challenge, | ||
| 156 | 08:25 | and City Nature Challenge is a project of the California Academy of Sciences | ||
| 157 | 08:29 | and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. | ||
| 158 | 08:32 | So for four years, City Nature Challenge has enjoined cities all over the globe | ||
| 159 | 08:37 | to participate in counting up biodiversity in their cities. | ||
| 160 | 08:42 | We're up to, like, a million observations of biodiversity | ||
| 161 | 08:46 | collected by people around the globe this past April. | ||
| 162 | 08:50 | The winner this year was South Africa, much to the chagrin of San Francisco. | ||
| 163 | 08:55 | (Laughter) | ||
| 164 | 08:56 | Look at them, they have more biodiversity than we do. | ||
| 165 | 08:59 | It's kind of an interesting thing, what is revealed when you start seeing | ||
| 166 | 09:02 | what are the natural resources where you live, | ||
| 167 | 09:05 | because as we go forward, you want to live where there's more biodiversity. | ||
| 168 | 09:08 | And by the way, citizen science is a very good tool for social justice | ||
| 169 | 09:12 | and environmental justice goals, for helping reach them. | ||
| 170 | 09:14 | You need to have data and you need to show a picture, | ||
| 171 | 09:17 | you need to point to a cause | ||
| 172 | 09:18 | and then you need to have the surgical strike | ||
| 173 | 09:21 | to help support whatever that problem is. | ||
| 174 | 09:25 | So City Nature Challenge, I think, should get a commendation from the UN. | ||
| 175 | 09:29 | Has there ever been a global effort on behalf of nature | ||
| 176 | 09:35 | undertaken in this coordinated manner? | ||
| 177 | 09:38 | It's amazing, it's fantastic | ||
| 178 | 09:40 | and it's really a pretty grassroots thing, | ||
| 179 | 09:43 | and we get very interesting information about butterflies and other creatures | ||
| 180 | 09:47 | when we do these bioblitzes. | ||
| 181 | 09:50 | City Nature Challenge basically works with a tool called iNaturalist, | ||
| 182 | 09:53 | and iNaturalist is your entry drug to citizen science. (Laughs) | ||
| 183 | 09:57 | I suggest signing up for it on a laptop or on a desktop, | ||
| 184 | 10:01 | and then you put the app on your phone. | ||
| 185 | 10:04 | With iNaturalist, you take a picture of a bird, a bug, a snake, anything, | ||
| 186 | 10:09 | and an artificial intelligence function and an expert vetting system | ||
| 187 | 10:15 | works to verify that observation. | ||
| 188 | 10:17 | The app gives the observation the date, the time, the latitude and the longitude, | ||
| 189 | 10:22 | geolocates that observation. | ||
| 190 | 10:24 | That's the data, that's the science of citizen science. | ||
| 191 | 10:27 | And then that data is shared, | ||
| 192 | 10:29 | and that sharing, that is the soul of citizen science. | ||
| 193 | 10:33 | When we share data, | ||
| 194 | 10:35 | we can see much bigger pictures of what's going on. | ||
| 195 | 10:38 | There's no way to see that whole monarch migration | ||
| 196 | 10:41 | without sharing data that's been collected over decades, | ||
| 197 | 10:46 | seeing the heart and soul of how nature works | ||
| 198 | 10:49 | through citizen science. | ||
| 199 | 10:51 | This is a Xerces blue butterfly, | ||
| 200 | 10:53 | which went extinct when it lost its habitat in Golden Gate Park. | ||
| 201 | 10:57 | It had a coevolutionary relationship with an ant, and that's another story. | ||
| 202 | 11:01 | (Laughter) | ||
| 203 | 11:02 | I'll end by asking you, | ||
| 204 | 11:05 | please participate in citizen science in some way, shape or form. | ||
| 205 | 11:10 | It is an amazingly positive thing. | ||
| 206 | 11:13 | It takes an army of people to make it really work. | ||
| 207 | 11:17 | And I'll just add that I think butterflies | ||
| 208 | 11:20 | probably really do have enough on their plate | ||
| 209 | 11:22 | without carrying around human souls. | ||
| 210 | 11:24 | (Laughter) | ||
| 211 | 11:26 | But there's a lot we don't know, right? | ||
| 212 | 11:28 | And what about all those stories? What are those stories telling us? | ||
| 213 | 11:32 | Maybe we coevolved our souls with butterflies? | ||
| 214 | 11:35 | Certainly, we are connected to butterflies in deeper ways than we currently know, | ||
| 215 | 11:40 | and the mystery of the butterfly will never be revealed | ||
| 216 | 11:43 | if we don't save them. | ||
| 217 | 11:45 | So, please join me in helping to save nature now. | ||
| 218 | 11:51 | Thank you. | ||
| 219 | 11:52 | (Applause) |