Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I know I have told this story on the show before. I think it was on a behind the scenes that when I was a kid, I used to write pamphlets about science and nature and leave them around the house because I thought my family needed to be educated. Those are all sourced from our nineteen seventy six editions of the world book Encyclopedia Um. Listen. We could talk about what a conceited little child I was, but that's a different story. But I will tell you that butterflies got a lot of coverage in those missives. It was actually one of the few topics that got multiple pamphlets written about them. It was pretty much like butterflies, fox Is and astronomy, where the big repeat items. But most of the time it was just a little and when I say pamphlets, I mean like a little two pages stapled and folded together and everything written in pencil. Like I really thought my family was going to study this ridiculous business written by like a snooty seven year old but in any case, monarchs were a very big favorite, like they are for many many kids. We talked about that a little bit on the behind the scenes as well. We are still those sitting sort of smack dab in the middle of the history of monarchs as we know it, and the next chapter of that history is really going to be up to humans. So I thought we would talk today about what we know about these very beautiful and flashy insects that are also common enough that most of us have familiarity with them if we grew up in North America. Talk about how we came to know, what we do know about them, and what we're still trying to figure out, as well as what parts of the story have kind of been misrepresented over the years. So the monarch butterfly is probably the most widely recognized butterfly in the world. I would say definitely in the US. Just hearing the common name, most people can immediately picture it. And just in case you can't, this species has bright orange wings with black veins and black borders. Those butterflies scientific name is then OUs plexipus. It's a milkweed butterfly, meaning that it's in the subfamily dana a within the family Nymphalidae. We'll talk a little bit about that nomenclature in a little bit, but we mentioned milkweat there, and that's the primary diet of monarch butterflies, which is unique because milkwheat is toxic. It's just about everything else, including humans, And that's kind of how monarchs have survived so well for so long. They really don't have competition for food source. But it also has made them very welcome visitors for people who keep livestock. For example, because milkweed is poisonous to other animals, a healthy monarch population that can keep the plants growth in check reduces dangers to grazing herds. When we say poisonous, it's probably not going to kill any other animal, but it will make them very ill. Adult monarchs will also feed on other flowering plants as well as milkweed. Monarchs lay their eggs on the milkweed, and then those eggs hatch and the caterpillars are sitting right on their food. They eat their little egg first, and then they only eat the milkweed. They retain that plant's toxin in their bodies. This makes the caterpillars toxic to predators, although through the glycosides that they addressed, and this toxicity stays with the monarch through the pupa stage and into adulthood. So this probably won't kill a bird, but we'll make it sick if the bird eats the monarch. So most birds learn pretty quickly not to mess with them. And we mentioned the egg and caterpillar stages of the monarch's life cycle, but here's a little bit more detail. While the courtship between male and female butterflies of this species happens largely in the air, the actual meeting and fertilization happens in what's often called ground phase, and then the females head to their breeding ground, which sometimes requires migration, something we're going to talk about a lot more throughout this episode. And then they lay their eggs. As we said on milkweed plants, a single female can lay as many as three hundred to five hundred eggs over the course of several weeks. And when the caterpillars hatch, as Tracy said, they start to munch. And the caterpillars of monarchs are black, yellow and white stripe. They're even pretty interesting looking. In that stage, it takes about two weeks for monarchs to go through their egg and larva stages. Once they've reached full size as a caterpillar, loaded up with all those glycosides from their food source, they enter the pupa stage. Pupation is when the monarch caterpillar forms a case around its body, known as a chrysalist. Normally this hangs from the underside of the milkweed leaf inside the crysalis. Over period of nine to fifteen days, metamorphosis takes place. The insects wings grow in and its body changes shape. Once it emerges from the crysalist at changes even more as the wings attain their full stretch in the body elongates. Yeah. I have also seen some research that said that the milkweed is not really where they're gonna do their their pupa stage. I have read sources that say both. So just f y I have that rang oddly to you. Uh. The life span of monarchs varies, and that is actually connected to their migration cycle. Most generations of monarchs live for a few weeks. You'll sometimes listed as a month. Uh, You'll sometimes see it as six weeks. But the generation that hatches late in the summer is destined for the fall migration south for winter, and there's a cool mechanism in place to enable them to live long enough to make that trip, which is that they have a delay in their sexual maturation. While normally a monarch butterflies life would be all about finding a mate once it matures and then laying eggs, completing its life mission, the pre autumn group doesn't normally mate until after they have over winter in the reproduction cycle begins in March, so they can live as long as eight months. Monarch butterflies are generally considered to be native to North and South America, Although the population in South America is now quite small, they can be found in small numbers and several other places. Hawaii, Spain, and Australia all have their own monarch populations, but North America is really their primary location. Yeah. You will also see a lot of different information about how they got to places like Hawaii, Spain, and Australia, whether those were brought there by people, or whether they migrated there themselves, or whether they got there through some other means of naturally being there for maybe much longer than we know. What we do know is that they don't migrate in any of those other places only in North America. So there are two recognized populations of monarch butterflies in North America. The western breeding group consists of the butterflies that are west of the Rocky Mountain. The Eastern group lives and breeds primarily in Canada and the Great Plains, as well as areas farther to the east. And perhaps the most unique characteristic of monarch butterflies is the fact that they do migrate. The western monarchs typically over winter in southern California, in the eastern group migrates to central Mexico for winter. It takes generations to make the full cycle of their journey. The migration southward typically happens in one generation, and then the northward migration happens in two to four, depending on how far north they travel. After each generation lays eggs, they die, and the resulting offspring continue on with the track. This, of course, follows a route that shifts with temperatures. What's really odd and marvelous is that the generation that makes it to the southernmost destination point always returns to the same place, a place that that generation has never been in which it's parents and grandparent generations had also never been to either, yet they keep returning year after year. Nobody knows exactly why, although there's a great deal of study that's gone into attempting to figure it out, and we will talk about some of that work later on. Based on fossil record evidence, we know that butterflies have been around for roughly a hundred and seventy five million years, but we don't know exactly when humans became consciously aware of monarch butterflies. The first people to see and recognize them were, of course, indigenous populations of north, central and South America, but there's not really a written record of that. We do know that the oldest specimens that were known to white Europeans were in the collection of James pett Over, and that comes with some baggage that we should unpack. James Pettiver was born in London in sixteen sixty three. His father died before he was a teenager, and his maternal grandfather, Richard Elboro, paid for his schooling. In June of sixteen seventy seven, when he was fourteen, James became a athecary apprentice under a man named Charles Feldum, who worked for London's St Bartholomew's Hospital. While completing his apprenticeship and before becoming an independent apothecary, Pettever joined the Society of Apothecaries and it was through outings with this group that he began his first herbarium collection that is now in London's Natural History Museum. James finished his apprenticeship in five and opened an apothecary business of his own at the sign of the White Cross, Aldersgate Street, and that's where he worked for the rest of his life. And during that life he became incredibly well known. He was active in the science community and developed and maintained relationships with members of the Royal Society as he offered his expertise on various matters, and his herbarium collection, which grew to include thousands of samples, was really renowned. While pett Over collected many samples himself, he gained a lot of specimens thanks to his relationships with explorers and sailors who he asked to pick up unique items as traveled around the world. That's how he came into possession of a monarch butterfly, which was preserved for him between two sheets of mica paper. This is noted as having been collected between six and seventeen o nine in Maryland. Now we're mentioning all of this because it connects our knowledge of monarchs in history, as well as other information about the natural world, to the slave trade. In a paper by Kathleen S. Murphy published in the William and Mary Quarterly in October, the author tracked the people that provided pet overt specimens from the Atlantic basin, and almost half of them were on ships that traveled slave trade routes, including the ones that went to Maryland, which is where that butterfly was found. And we're talking about all of this because this is a lustrative of how deeply intertwined so many parts of European and North American history are with the slave trade, even the parts that don't on their surface have any obvious connection. In that paper, Murphy makes the point that all of the people that pett Over worked with were ships surgeons or captains, so they were men of rank who were actively engaged in slavery. No one in this transaction could really claim ignorance. So while the collections and publications of pett Over helped advanced Europe's knowledge of the natural world and of monarch butterflies. That knowledge came at a price that's really not acknowledged. Most of the time, we'll talk about mentions of monarch butterflies that came after pett Over, after we pause for a sponsor break. After pett Over specimen. The next significant example we have of a monarch butterfly in the historical record is the illustration work of Mark Catesby. Katesby was born in sixty three in Essex, England, and unlike Petaver, Katesby made the trip to North America to collect specimens himself more than once. When his father died in seventeen twelve, Katesby traveled to live with his sister and her husband in Virginia, and there he began collecting seeds and specimens for collectors back home in England, as well as drawing many of them or painting them so the specimens would have accompanying illustrations. He stayed in the colonies for seven years, traveling through the Appalachian Mountains and around the southeast, and he even went to Jamaica before returning to London in seventeen nineteen. And when he got back to England, his work was very well received by the scientific community. At this point in time. Just for context, Sir Isaac Newton was chair of the Royal Society, and under the auspices of the Society, botanist William Sharard led a fundraising effort to send Katesby back to the colony so he could do more of this work. The Royal Society was able to drum up enough sponsors that it could pay for Mark Katesby's second transatlantic voyage to North America to do a more comprehensive survey of the continents, flora and fauna. He sailed in February of seventeen twenty two, and after three months at sea, made it to the destination of South Carolina. Over the course of four years, Katesby fulfilled his mission to document as much of the North American Southeast natural world as possible. We focused on the Atlantic coastal low country of South Carolina and Florida, as well as the Bahamas. After Katesby once again returned to England, he started compiling his field notes, specimens and illustrations into a two volume work titled Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. This project took a lot of time. The first volume published in seventeen twenty nine, the second not until seventeen forty seven, so it's eighteen years later. And it is in that second volume of the work, which is dedicated to Augusta, Princess of Wales, that Katesby's illustration of the monarch butterfly appears. It's quite beautiful. It is played eighty eight in the book, and it features the butterfly along with a dollar orchid and a amshell orchid, both of which are growing from the trunk of a tree. By this point, people were already calling the butterfly a monarch. It's believed that the name was given to the insect by early English colonists in North America as a nod to William the third of England, also known as William of Orange, having been born the Prince of Orange, but it wasn't yet classified scientifically. That didn't happen until seventeen fifty eight, when Carl Linnaeus included it in his tenth edition of systema natural. Linnaeus, who was born in seventeen oh seven in Small and Sweden, is of course famous for his classification of binomial nomenclature and due to starting out without the benefit of a wealthy family to support his studies. Linnaeus who could easily be a future podcast subject because I don't think he's shown up on the show before. Surprisingly now we've mentioned him, but like not in a bunch of focus. No, he had to take kind of a slow root in his pursuit of a career and becoming a published scientific writer. His deep hist interest was botany. It was something he had loved since he was young, but he became a medical doctor to support himself, and it was only after that, after he became a doctor, that he started to get the backing to start publishing his system of Nature that started out with a first volume that was a folio just eleven pages long. Linnaeus was aided by information like Catesby's illustrations, and he placed the monarch in his taxonomy, giving it the genus Papilio and the species plexipus. Linnaeus initially put all butterflies in the genus Papilio, but that changed over time. Linnaeus had included subgenuses of which denounce was one, and that system was then refined by other taxonomists after Lennius died. Today, the Papilio genus mostly contains swallowtail butterflies, whereas the nounces its own genus composed of what sometimes called the tiger butterfly tribe or the tiger butterfly group. You'll also see the North American monarch specifically referred to as the subspecies denounced Plexipus plexipus. Yeah, that's just since there are some that are basically biologically identical, but they appear in other places. Linnaeus noted in his writing that he had chosen the names using the sons of the Greek mythological figure Agypdis, though in Greek legend, Denounced is the brother of Agypdis. Plexipus was one of a Gypdiss fifty sons, though in that legend, just to give you context, Denounce had fifty daughters. In Agypdis force denounced to marry his daughters to Agypticiss fifty sons, so convenient they had the same number, and all of the daughters, at their father's instruction, killed their new husbands on their wedding night. That's, of course, only one part of the mythology of these people, but carl Naeus may have been a bit confused on the exact nature of the story, and in any case, the nomenclature that he chose for butterflies doesn't seem to reflect any observations about their behaviors or life cycle. Observing that life cycle is something that has interested naturalists for centuries now. In one the over wintering sites of the monarch along the California coast were identified, but there was still the eastern group. Nobody was quite sure where they were going in the winter, at least nobody who didn't live where they were going. For a long time, the Gulf coast of Florida was believed to be one possibility, and naturalists hunted for that spot where the butterflies might be riding out the winter. Soon, it became apparent that although that area is warmer than other parts of the US and the winter, it still can experience frosts, and butterflies can't survive that kind of temperature drop. So that was finally ruled out, and this is where Fred and Nora Urkhardt come into the story. Fred Erkhart had been fascinated by monarch butterflies since his Toronto, Ontario childhood, and that fascination had never abated. It actually led him to study biology at the University of Toronto starting in the ninth thirties, and then he went on to earn his master's degree and his PhD in the same field. When he finished his education, he became the insect collection curator for the Royal Ontario Museum. During his education, he met Norah Roden, who was also enrolled in the school, although she was studying social work. During World War Two, Fred worked in meteorological service and when that conflict ended, he took a job at the University of Toronto and he and Nora were married. In There's was a true partnership. Nora became as passionate about butterflies as bread was, and one question really was plaguing them, which was where did these insects go in the winter? Together they sought out the answer. It's kind of interesting because they're now pretty well known for having done this. But uh. In one interview, friend mentioned that people were like, why are you doing this? There's no money in this, and he's like, it's making me crazy not to know. I want to They want to know. Uh. And one of the first things that the carts did was to try to find a way to tag butterflies. This was challenging, as you might expect. They not only had to come up with something that would stay in place, but it also couldn't hurt the butterfly or impede the insectibility to fly. They tried various paint options and labels which did not work, and then they came up with a system that finally passed the test. That test, incidentally involved gently tying the butterflies to the handlebars of Fred's bike with a fine thread, and then he would ride and make sure that they could fly along with him. But that solution was price tag stickers that were intended for glassware. Because they were light enough that they didn't make a big difference. Fred and Nora developed a careful system in which they scraped some of the scales off of one of the insects wings, and then they would fold the sticker around the edge of the wing. The butterflies kept flying as normal, seemingly unbothered. Every tiny sticker had contact information for the cart's office, so that anybody who found one of these butterflies, or even just saw them, might be able to report into the couple. But this also meant that there needed to be away to let particularly amateur lepidopters know to even be looking for butterflies with stickers on them. So the next step was a print campaign. Nora had the idea to place ads in newspapers and magazines around the United States to explain the project and ask citizens science to help out. You'll sometimes see this as like referenced as the first big citizen science project. And they got volunteers through the organization that they established, which was the Insect Migration Association, to help them tag all of the thousands of Toronto area butterflies. We'll talk about the response to those ads after we pause, and here from some of the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. It wasn't long after Nora's ad placements the data and information started flowing in. Every time someone contacted the carts to report a sighting of a butterfly, Fred and Nora noted it on a big map. One theory at the start of the project was that Eastern monarchs might be joining the Western group along the California coast. The information that Fred and Nora collected quickly made it appearent that wasn't happening. For one thing, there simply were not enough monarchs in California to make up for the migrating numbers leaving Southern Canada. In the US, the next step was to travel to the southern US themselves to see what they might be able to find out. So they drove twenty thousand miles as they traveled all around Texas, just chasing leads and coming up short. Their information. Stopped at the Mexican border because their ad placements had only been in US papers. So they did the next logical thing, which was to put announcements in papers south of the border, and one of their primary responses came from an American man named Kenneth Brugger, who wrote, quote, I read with interest your article on the monarch. It occurred to me that I might be of some help. Kenneth was an engineer from Wisconsin working at a textile firm in Mexico City, and he had seen groups of monarchs in the area before long. Brogger and a woman who he identified as Cathy Iguado, and we'll talk about him identifying her as that in a bit started tracking the insects in their Winnebago. Brogger and Aguado married in May nineteen seventy four, after they had started helping the ark Harts, and the two couples met when Kenneth and Cathy, whose real name is Catalina. She apparently did not actually like the name Kathy, which is what her husband called her when they visited Toronto. After the Broggers returned to Mexico. There was a system. The Harts would send them tips that they got from people who had spotted the tagged butterflies, and Kinne than Catalina would follow up on those sidings and then report back. They were essentially being the boots on the ground for the Canadian couple. Often Ken would drive and Catalina would scan the landscape with binoculars looking for butterflies. At this point, Ken had retired and they were free to pretty much spend their time as they wished. Yeah, they had gone from doing this only on the weekends to this being basically their full time lives. Um, they did a lot of it. We're telling a very fast version, but it took them a long time. Throughout Christmas nineteen seventy four and into New Year's Day of nineteen seventy five, the Bruggers had been following monarchs near the mountains in mitchokn that's about hundred and fifty miles from where Catalina had grown up. On January second, nineteen seventy five, they hiked up the mountain known as Sarah Polone, which is an old volcano, and in that afternoon, after a long day of hiking in fairly miserable conditions, Catalina looked up and she yelled back to Ken that she needed a camera because they had found it a surreal sanctuary, filled with monarchs everywhere they looked. Catalina later described this moment this way in an interview quote, neither of us could talk. I will never get over seeing so many butterflies at one time. I don't have the words to describe what I saw. My mind just went blank. Then Ken and I walked together. We kept whispering, wow, Wow, Wow. We didn't want to scare the monarchs and their own sanctuary. The ground was a foot and a half deep with them. They covered the tree trunks like pages of a book. We stepped carefully so as not to kill any With each step, I'd shake my foot back and forth until I could feel the bare ground. Then we stood in the middle of a clearing, and as Catalina became still, the monarchs just started landing right on her. She recounted quote, I felt their scratchy feet on my face and thought to myself, Oh, my god, what are we going to do now? I wish everyone in the world had my eyes right now to see what I'm seeing and feel what I'm feeling, because this is so amazing. My god, you butterflies flew thousands of miles and here you are. After hurrying back down the trail in the dying light, Ken called the ark Hearts, and the days that followed, Catalina and Ken found several more colonies. They told nobody besides Bread and Nora, for fear that this mountain forest would then be flushed with humans who would not be as careful as they were. And the following year, when it was time for the Monarchs to migrate to Mexico, the ark Hearts joined Ken and Catalina and Sarah Polone. They were also accompanied by a National Geographic photographer. In August of ninety six, the Monarch Migration News was the cover story for National Geographic. It ran with the title Discovered the Monarch's Mexican Haven. The cover image is Catalina covered in monarchs something. It mentions Ken Brugger's dog Coola, being by his side as he sought out these butterflies. It casually references his wife, Kathy, who's referred to as quote a bright and delightful Mexican. It never says that she is the person in the cover image. It also doesn't acknowledge that the local population had known that the monarchs were over wintering there for generations, and most of those people were like, yes, my grandfather talked about these all the time. Um and literally, that thing that Tracy just read about Kathy, as she was called in the article, is all that she has mentioned. The rite up is full of quotes from Fred Urkhardt, who did undeniably catalyze the entire project. He told the magazine quote, those who have had a dream and have lived to see that dream come true will have some conception of my feelings when I first entered the Mexican forest, and there before my eyes was the realization of a dream that had haunted me since I was sixteen. After that article published, Fred and Nora's life was pretty much all about butterfly study. Fred wrote numerous books and articles about their tracking project in the ongoing study and discoveries regarding monarchs, and Nora kept their organization going and managed their business affairs. Catalina and Ken divorced in the early nineties, and Catalina had stayed out of the public eye as the ark Hearts and ken Brugger became known as the team that cracked the butterfly migration puzzle. But today she's the only surviving member of the group, and over the years she's come to be more widely recognized for the part that she played in this discovery. She consulted on the docu drama about the monarchs called Flight of the Butterflies that came out in She advocates for the conservation of monarch habitats and continues to be on that keep a low profile. It's clear today that because she was the only Spanish fluent Mexican born member of the team, it was Catalina who really enabled the mission and to actually meet its goals, particularly the segments of her journey with Ken where they had to negotiate both terrain and the local populations that he had really no experience with. In an interview that she gave in twenty Catalina told a journalist quote, I searched for the monarchs because of the love I have for all insects and all of nature, for the awe that they provoked in me in all the beautiful and ugly ways. I care about the truth and the marvelous way that nature works in all of us. And then here's the big reason that Holly wanted to do this episode. Holly is the one who researched it. In case that was not obvious, Uh, some of our listeners have probably guessed it. The monarch butterfly was classified as endangered on July two, that's about a week before we're recording this episode and a few weeks before it will come out. According to information reviewed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature or i U see in, in the last decade, monarch numbers have declined between twenty three and seventy two. It's a really wide swing, and that's due to variations in measurement, something that's pretty natural when you're trying to track an insect by site. The western monarch population has declined by n nine per cent since the nineteen eighties, and their eastern counterparts are doing slightly better. But the numbers are still really grave. Their decline since the nineteen eighties is eighty percent, so over just four decades they've gone from thriving to endangered. There are multiple contributors to these dramatic drops. One of the biggest is habitat loss. Logging and construction have wiped out forests that monarchs once visited along your migratory paths. Another is pesticides. Chemical treatments have not only killed butterflies, but also the milkweed plants that they need to survive. Climate change is another threat. During extreme weather events like storms, floods, and drought, butterflies die in large numbers. The United States has not yet listed the monarch as an endangered species through the Endangered Species Act, but many conservation and environmentalist groups across the country are lobbying for that listing. That listing would be an important step toward guiding recovery efforts because once the species is on the list, critical habitat areas become legally protected. That catalyzes the development of recovery plans as well as carrying them out. And there is some indication that numbers might be bolstering a little showing that in some areas the numbers in the population have gone up ever so slightly. This is just in the last year, but it isn't necessarily a sign that things will continue to get better on their own, but it does offer some hope that with conservation efforts in place, the population may continue to rebound. Today we know more than ever about monarchs, but we also still have a lot of questions. There have been projects that have involved genetic sequencing of the speci used to try to more fully understand their inner compass and their longevity shifts, as well as color differences. There have also been concerned that some studies of monarch DNA have accidentally used misidentified butterflies that are not monarchs. Yeah, there are a lot of butterfly species that kind of mimic the look of monarchs because it's beneficial to them to look like a toxic animal um and that there may have been some confusion in there. Mexico has taken steps to protect the monarchs over wintering locations in the country established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, and at the time of its founding, that reserve consisted of four forests totaling about sixty two square miles of land, but today that area has expanded. It's now two hundred seventeen square miles and most of this land is communally owned by the communities that live there, and efforts have been made to help transition the residents of those communities from their former occupations in fields like logging, which would have been detrimental to butterflies, two more conservation minded sources of income, such as bee keeping. There is also a growing eco tourism economy there. If you live in the US and you want to learn more about how you can help monarch populations, you can visit Monarch joint Venture dot org. It's a partnership of multiple agencies and conservation groups from across the country. Butterflies, yeah, about which I got very choked up at the end. Um. I have fun listener mail though about something that several people have reached out to me about on Twitter from one of our previous episodes, and that is Salmon Vertebrae. Oh yeah. This particular email is from our listener Elizabeth, who writes, Hye, Holly and Tracy, I love your podcast and my ears perked up at the mention of Salmon Vertebrae. As beads. This is a great idea with regard to your concern about smell. I have some advice. I am an our geologist. I won't say where Elizabeth works, just to be safe and preserve her privacy, and my specialty is zoo archaeology. On occasion, I have to turn an animal carcass into a skeleton for comparative purposes, so I have some relevant experience. Once you've cleaned the vertebrae in a very low simmer to soften and remove any soft bits, soak the vertebrae in a bath of hydrogen peroxide over the counter stuff is fine for a few minutes, and then let them dry. Repeat the peroxide bath until they don't smell. Do not use bleach that will make the vertebrae brittle over time and chalky. For your amusement, I enclose a picture of my cat, Eggs, who is helping me take notes from my weekly D and D game. Best regards, Elizabeth. Okay, Eggs is an orange tabby and adorable and I want to kiss Eggs. Um. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This is great information. So for any of you that reached out to me on Twitter about ways that you might also do a salmon bead project. We'll see if I get around to it, but I still think it's pretty great. Uh, then that's how to do it. There have also been people that have sent me that amazing UM. I didn't take notes on it for this, but there's an artist who has done some really beautiful salmon bead garment projects that are just spectacularly beautiful. So UH, seek those out because they're worth looking at. Thank you again, Elizabeth. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at my heart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, you can do that on the I heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I know I have told this story on the show before. I think it was on a behind the scenes that when I was a kid, I used to write pamphlets about science and nature and leave them around the house because I thought my family needed to be educated. Those are all sourced from our nineteen seventy six editions of the world book Encyclopedia Um. Listen. We could talk about what a conceited little child I was, but that's a different story. But I will tell you that butterflies got a lot of coverage in those missives. It was actually one of the few topics that got multiple pamphlets written about them. It was pretty much like butterflies, fox Is and astronomy, where the big repeat items. But most of the time it was just a little and when I say pamphlets, I mean like a little two pages stapled and folded together and everything written in pencil. Like I really thought my family was going to study this ridiculous business written by like a snooty seven year old but in any case, monarchs were a very big favorite, like they are for many many kids. We talked about that a little bit on the behind the scenes as well. We are still those sitting sort of smack dab in the middle of the history of monarchs as we know it, and the next chapter of that history is really going to be up to humans. So I thought we would talk today about what we know about these very beautiful and flashy insects that are also common enough that most of us have familiarity with them if we grew up in North America. Talk about how we came to know, what we do know about them, and what we're still trying to figure out, as well as what parts of the story have kind of been misrepresented over the years. So the monarch butterfly is probably the most widely recognized butterfly in the world. I would say definitely in the US. Just hearing the common name, most people can immediately picture it. And just in case you can't, this species has bright orange wings with black veins and black borders. Those butterflies scientific name is then OUs plexipus. It's a milkweed butterfly, meaning that it's in the subfamily dana a within the family Nymphalidae. We'll talk a little bit about that nomenclature in a little bit, but we mentioned milkweat there, and that's the primary diet of monarch butterflies, which is unique because milkwheat is toxic. It's just about everything else, including humans, And that's kind of how monarchs have survived so well for so long. They really don't have competition for food source. But it also has made them very welcome visitors for people who keep livestock. For example, because milkweed is poisonous to other animals, a healthy monarch population that can keep the plants growth in check reduces dangers to grazing herds. When we say poisonous, it's probably not going to kill any other animal, but it will make them very ill. Adult monarchs will also feed on other flowering plants as well as milkweed. Monarchs lay their eggs on the milkweed, and then those eggs hatch and the caterpillars are sitting right on their food. They eat their little egg first, and then they only eat the milkweed. They retain that plant's toxin in their bodies. This makes the caterpillars toxic to predators, although through the glycosides that they addressed, and this toxicity stays with the monarch through the pupa stage and into adulthood. So this probably won't kill a bird, but we'll make it sick if the bird eats the monarch. So most birds learn pretty quickly not to mess with them. And we mentioned the egg and caterpillar stages of the monarch's life cycle, but here's a little bit more detail. While the courtship between male and female butterflies of this species happens largely in the air, the actual meeting and fertilization happens in what's often called ground phase, and then the females head to their breeding ground, which sometimes requires migration, something we're going to talk about a lot more throughout this episode. And then they lay their eggs. As we said on milkweed plants, a single female can lay as many as three hundred to five hundred eggs over the course of several weeks. And when the caterpillars hatch, as Tracy said, they start to munch. And the caterpillars of monarchs are black, yellow and white stripe. They're even pretty interesting looking. In that stage, it takes about two weeks for monarchs to go through their egg and larva stages. Once they've reached full size as a caterpillar, loaded up with all those glycosides from their food source, they enter the pupa stage. Pupation is when the monarch caterpillar forms a case around its body, known as a chrysalist. Normally this hangs from the underside of the milkweed leaf inside the crysalis. Over period of nine to fifteen days, metamorphosis takes place. The insects wings grow in and its body changes shape. Once it emerges from the crysalist at changes even more as the wings attain their full stretch in the body elongates. Yeah. I have also seen some research that said that the milkweed is not really where they're gonna do their their pupa stage. I have read sources that say both. So just f y I have that rang oddly to you. Uh. The life span of monarchs varies, and that is actually connected to their migration cycle. Most generations of monarchs live for a few weeks. You'll sometimes listed as a month. Uh, You'll sometimes see it as six weeks. But the generation that hatches late in the summer is destined for the fall migration south for winter, and there's a cool mechanism in place to enable them to live long enough to make that trip, which is that they have a delay in their sexual maturation. While normally a monarch butterflies life would be all about finding a mate once it matures and then laying eggs, completing its life mission, the pre autumn group doesn't normally mate until after they have over winter in the reproduction cycle begins in March, so they can live as long as eight months. Monarch butterflies are generally considered to be native to North and South America, Although the population in South America is now quite small, they can be found in small numbers and several other places. Hawaii, Spain, and Australia all have their own monarch populations, but North America is really their primary location. Yeah. You will also see a lot of different information about how they got to places like Hawaii, Spain, and Australia, whether those were brought there by people, or whether they migrated there themselves, or whether they got there through some other means of naturally being there for maybe much longer than we know. What we do know is that they don't migrate in any of those other places only in North America. So there are two recognized populations of monarch butterflies in North America. The western breeding group consists of the butterflies that are west of the Rocky Mountain. The Eastern group lives and breeds primarily in Canada and the Great Plains, as well as areas farther to the east. And perhaps the most unique characteristic of monarch butterflies is the fact that they do migrate. The western monarchs typically over winter in southern California, in the eastern group migrates to central Mexico for winter. It takes generations to make the full cycle of their journey. The migration southward typically happens in one generation, and then the northward migration happens in two to four, depending on how far north they travel. After each generation lays eggs, they die, and the resulting offspring continue on with the track. This, of course, follows a route that shifts with temperatures. What's really odd and marvelous is that the generation that makes it to the southernmost destination point always returns to the same place, a place that that generation has never been in which it's parents and grandparent generations had also never been to either, yet they keep returning year after year. Nobody knows exactly why, although there's a great deal of study that's gone into attempting to figure it out, and we will talk about some of that work later on. Based on fossil record evidence, we know that butterflies have been around for roughly a hundred and seventy five million years, but we don't know exactly when humans became consciously aware of monarch butterflies. The first people to see and recognize them were, of course, indigenous populations of north, central and South America, but there's not really a written record of that. We do know that the oldest specimens that were known to white Europeans were in the collection of James pett Over, and that comes with some baggage that we should unpack. James Pettiver was born in London in sixteen sixty three. His father died before he was a teenager, and his maternal grandfather, Richard Elboro, paid for his schooling. In June of sixteen seventy seven, when he was fourteen, James became a athecary apprentice under a man named Charles Feldum, who worked for London's St Bartholomew's Hospital. While completing his apprenticeship and before becoming an independent apothecary, Pettever joined the Society of Apothecaries and it was through outings with this group that he began his first herbarium collection that is now in London's Natural History Museum. James finished his apprenticeship in five and opened an apothecary business of his own at the sign of the White Cross, Aldersgate Street, and that's where he worked for the rest of his life. And during that life he became incredibly well known. He was active in the science community and developed and maintained relationships with members of the Royal Society as he offered his expertise on various matters, and his herbarium collection, which grew to include thousands of samples, was really renowned. While pett Over collected many samples himself, he gained a lot of specimens thanks to his relationships with explorers and sailors who he asked to pick up unique items as traveled around the world. That's how he came into possession of a monarch butterfly, which was preserved for him between two sheets of mica paper. This is noted as having been collected between six and seventeen o nine in Maryland. Now we're mentioning all of this because it connects our knowledge of monarchs in history, as well as other information about the natural world, to the slave trade. In a paper by Kathleen S. Murphy published in the William and Mary Quarterly in October, the author tracked the people that provided pet overt specimens from the Atlantic basin, and almost half of them were on ships that traveled slave trade routes, including the ones that went to Maryland, which is where that butterfly was found. And we're talking about all of this because this is a lustrative of how deeply intertwined so many parts of European and North American history are with the slave trade, even the parts that don't on their surface have any obvious connection. In that paper, Murphy makes the point that all of the people that pett Over worked with were ships surgeons or captains, so they were men of rank who were actively engaged in slavery. No one in this transaction could really claim ignorance. So while the collections and publications of pett Over helped advanced Europe's knowledge of the natural world and of monarch butterflies. That knowledge came at a price that's really not acknowledged. Most of the time, we'll talk about mentions of monarch butterflies that came after pett Over, after we pause for a sponsor break. After pett Over specimen. The next significant example we have of a monarch butterfly in the historical record is the illustration work of Mark Catesby. Katesby was born in sixty three in Essex, England, and unlike Petaver, Katesby made the trip to North America to collect specimens himself more than once. When his father died in seventeen twelve, Katesby traveled to live with his sister and her husband in Virginia, and there he began collecting seeds and specimens for collectors back home in England, as well as drawing many of them or painting them so the specimens would have accompanying illustrations. He stayed in the colonies for seven years, traveling through the Appalachian Mountains and around the southeast, and he even went to Jamaica before returning to London in seventeen nineteen. And when he got back to England, his work was very well received by the scientific community. At this point in time. Just for context, Sir Isaac Newton was chair of the Royal Society, and under the auspices of the Society, botanist William Sharard led a fundraising effort to send Katesby back to the colony so he could do more of this work. The Royal Society was able to drum up enough sponsors that it could pay for Mark Katesby's second transatlantic voyage to North America to do a more comprehensive survey of the continents, flora and fauna. He sailed in February of seventeen twenty two, and after three months at sea, made it to the destination of South Carolina. Over the course of four years, Katesby fulfilled his mission to document as much of the North American Southeast natural world as possible. We focused on the Atlantic coastal low country of South Carolina and Florida, as well as the Bahamas. After Katesby once again returned to England, he started compiling his field notes, specimens and illustrations into a two volume work titled Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. This project took a lot of time. The first volume published in seventeen twenty nine, the second not until seventeen forty seven, so it's eighteen years later. And it is in that second volume of the work, which is dedicated to Augusta, Princess of Wales, that Katesby's illustration of the monarch butterfly appears. It's quite beautiful. It is played eighty eight in the book, and it features the butterfly along with a dollar orchid and a amshell orchid, both of which are growing from the trunk of a tree. By this point, people were already calling the butterfly a monarch. It's believed that the name was given to the insect by early English colonists in North America as a nod to William the third of England, also known as William of Orange, having been born the Prince of Orange, but it wasn't yet classified scientifically. That didn't happen until seventeen fifty eight, when Carl Linnaeus included it in his tenth edition of systema natural. Linnaeus, who was born in seventeen oh seven in Small and Sweden, is of course famous for his classification of binomial nomenclature and due to starting out without the benefit of a wealthy family to support his studies. Linnaeus who could easily be a future podcast subject because I don't think he's shown up on the show before. Surprisingly now we've mentioned him, but like not in a bunch of focus. No, he had to take kind of a slow root in his pursuit of a career and becoming a published scientific writer. His deep hist interest was botany. It was something he had loved since he was young, but he became a medical doctor to support himself, and it was only after that, after he became a doctor, that he started to get the backing to start publishing his system of Nature that started out with a first volume that was a folio just eleven pages long. Linnaeus was aided by information like Catesby's illustrations, and he placed the monarch in his taxonomy, giving it the genus Papilio and the species plexipus. Linnaeus initially put all butterflies in the genus Papilio, but that changed over time. Linnaeus had included subgenuses of which denounce was one, and that system was then refined by other taxonomists after Lennius died. Today, the Papilio genus mostly contains swallowtail butterflies, whereas the nounces its own genus composed of what sometimes called the tiger butterfly tribe or the tiger butterfly group. You'll also see the North American monarch specifically referred to as the subspecies denounced Plexipus plexipus. Yeah, that's just since there are some that are basically biologically identical, but they appear in other places. Linnaeus noted in his writing that he had chosen the names using the sons of the Greek mythological figure Agypdis, though in Greek legend, Denounced is the brother of Agypdis. Plexipus was one of a Gypdiss fifty sons, though in that legend, just to give you context, Denounce had fifty daughters. In Agypdis force denounced to marry his daughters to Agypticiss fifty sons, so convenient they had the same number, and all of the daughters, at their father's instruction, killed their new husbands on their wedding night. That's, of course, only one part of the mythology of these people, but carl Naeus may have been a bit confused on the exact nature of the story, and in any case, the nomenclature that he chose for butterflies doesn't seem to reflect any observations about their behaviors or life cycle. Observing that life cycle is something that has interested naturalists for centuries now. In one the over wintering sites of the monarch along the California coast were identified, but there was still the eastern group. Nobody was quite sure where they were going in the winter, at least nobody who didn't live where they were going. For a long time, the Gulf coast of Florida was believed to be one possibility, and naturalists hunted for that spot where the butterflies might be riding out the winter. Soon, it became apparent that although that area is warmer than other parts of the US and the winter, it still can experience frosts, and butterflies can't survive that kind of temperature drop. So that was finally ruled out, and this is where Fred and Nora Urkhardt come into the story. Fred Erkhart had been fascinated by monarch butterflies since his Toronto, Ontario childhood, and that fascination had never abated. It actually led him to study biology at the University of Toronto starting in the ninth thirties, and then he went on to earn his master's degree and his PhD in the same field. When he finished his education, he became the insect collection curator for the Royal Ontario Museum. During his education, he met Norah Roden, who was also enrolled in the school, although she was studying social work. During World War Two, Fred worked in meteorological service and when that conflict ended, he took a job at the University of Toronto and he and Nora were married. In There's was a true partnership. Nora became as passionate about butterflies as bread was, and one question really was plaguing them, which was where did these insects go in the winter? Together they sought out the answer. It's kind of interesting because they're now pretty well known for having done this. But uh. In one interview, friend mentioned that people were like, why are you doing this? There's no money in this, and he's like, it's making me crazy not to know. I want to They want to know. Uh. And one of the first things that the carts did was to try to find a way to tag butterflies. This was challenging, as you might expect. They not only had to come up with something that would stay in place, but it also couldn't hurt the butterfly or impede the insectibility to fly. They tried various paint options and labels which did not work, and then they came up with a system that finally passed the test. That test, incidentally involved gently tying the butterflies to the handlebars of Fred's bike with a fine thread, and then he would ride and make sure that they could fly along with him. But that solution was price tag stickers that were intended for glassware. Because they were light enough that they didn't make a big difference. Fred and Nora developed a careful system in which they scraped some of the scales off of one of the insects wings, and then they would fold the sticker around the edge of the wing. The butterflies kept flying as normal, seemingly unbothered. Every tiny sticker had contact information for the cart's office, so that anybody who found one of these butterflies, or even just saw them, might be able to report into the couple. But this also meant that there needed to be away to let particularly amateur lepidopters know to even be looking for butterflies with stickers on them. So the next step was a print campaign. Nora had the idea to place ads in newspapers and magazines around the United States to explain the project and ask citizens science to help out. You'll sometimes see this as like referenced as the first big citizen science project. And they got volunteers through the organization that they established, which was the Insect Migration Association, to help them tag all of the thousands of Toronto area butterflies. We'll talk about the response to those ads after we pause, and here from some of the sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going. It wasn't long after Nora's ad placements the data and information started flowing in. Every time someone contacted the carts to report a sighting of a butterfly, Fred and Nora noted it on a big map. One theory at the start of the project was that Eastern monarchs might be joining the Western group along the California coast. The information that Fred and Nora collected quickly made it appearent that wasn't happening. For one thing, there simply were not enough monarchs in California to make up for the migrating numbers leaving Southern Canada. In the US, the next step was to travel to the southern US themselves to see what they might be able to find out. So they drove twenty thousand miles as they traveled all around Texas, just chasing leads and coming up short. Their information. Stopped at the Mexican border because their ad placements had only been in US papers. So they did the next logical thing, which was to put announcements in papers south of the border, and one of their primary responses came from an American man named Kenneth Brugger, who wrote, quote, I read with interest your article on the monarch. It occurred to me that I might be of some help. Kenneth was an engineer from Wisconsin working at a textile firm in Mexico City, and he had seen groups of monarchs in the area before long. Brogger and a woman who he identified as Cathy Iguado, and we'll talk about him identifying her as that in a bit started tracking the insects in their Winnebago. Brogger and Aguado married in May nineteen seventy four, after they had started helping the ark Harts, and the two couples met when Kenneth and Cathy, whose real name is Catalina. She apparently did not actually like the name Kathy, which is what her husband called her when they visited Toronto. After the Broggers returned to Mexico. There was a system. The Harts would send them tips that they got from people who had spotted the tagged butterflies, and Kinne than Catalina would follow up on those sidings and then report back. They were essentially being the boots on the ground for the Canadian couple. Often Ken would drive and Catalina would scan the landscape with binoculars looking for butterflies. At this point, Ken had retired and they were free to pretty much spend their time as they wished. Yeah, they had gone from doing this only on the weekends to this being basically their full time lives. Um, they did a lot of it. We're telling a very fast version, but it took them a long time. Throughout Christmas nineteen seventy four and into New Year's Day of nineteen seventy five, the Bruggers had been following monarchs near the mountains in mitchokn that's about hundred and fifty miles from where Catalina had grown up. On January second, nineteen seventy five, they hiked up the mountain known as Sarah Polone, which is an old volcano, and in that afternoon, after a long day of hiking in fairly miserable conditions, Catalina looked up and she yelled back to Ken that she needed a camera because they had found it a surreal sanctuary, filled with monarchs everywhere they looked. Catalina later described this moment this way in an interview quote, neither of us could talk. I will never get over seeing so many butterflies at one time. I don't have the words to describe what I saw. My mind just went blank. Then Ken and I walked together. We kept whispering, wow, Wow, Wow. We didn't want to scare the monarchs and their own sanctuary. The ground was a foot and a half deep with them. They covered the tree trunks like pages of a book. We stepped carefully so as not to kill any With each step, I'd shake my foot back and forth until I could feel the bare ground. Then we stood in the middle of a clearing, and as Catalina became still, the monarchs just started landing right on her. She recounted quote, I felt their scratchy feet on my face and thought to myself, Oh, my god, what are we going to do now? I wish everyone in the world had my eyes right now to see what I'm seeing and feel what I'm feeling, because this is so amazing. My god, you butterflies flew thousands of miles and here you are. After hurrying back down the trail in the dying light, Ken called the ark Hearts, and the days that followed, Catalina and Ken found several more colonies. They told nobody besides Bread and Nora, for fear that this mountain forest would then be flushed with humans who would not be as careful as they were. And the following year, when it was time for the Monarchs to migrate to Mexico, the ark Hearts joined Ken and Catalina and Sarah Polone. They were also accompanied by a National Geographic photographer. In August of ninety six, the Monarch Migration News was the cover story for National Geographic. It ran with the title Discovered the Monarch's Mexican Haven. The cover image is Catalina covered in monarchs something. It mentions Ken Brugger's dog Coola, being by his side as he sought out these butterflies. It casually references his wife, Kathy, who's referred to as quote a bright and delightful Mexican. It never says that she is the person in the cover image. It also doesn't acknowledge that the local population had known that the monarchs were over wintering there for generations, and most of those people were like, yes, my grandfather talked about these all the time. Um and literally, that thing that Tracy just read about Kathy, as she was called in the article, is all that she has mentioned. The rite up is full of quotes from Fred Urkhardt, who did undeniably catalyze the entire project. He told the magazine quote, those who have had a dream and have lived to see that dream come true will have some conception of my feelings when I first entered the Mexican forest, and there before my eyes was the realization of a dream that had haunted me since I was sixteen. After that article published, Fred and Nora's life was pretty much all about butterfly study. Fred wrote numerous books and articles about their tracking project in the ongoing study and discoveries regarding monarchs, and Nora kept their organization going and managed their business affairs. Catalina and Ken divorced in the early nineties, and Catalina had stayed out of the public eye as the ark Hearts and ken Brugger became known as the team that cracked the butterfly migration puzzle. But today she's the only surviving member of the group, and over the years she's come to be more widely recognized for the part that she played in this discovery. She consulted on the docu drama about the monarchs called Flight of the Butterflies that came out in She advocates for the conservation of monarch habitats and continues to be on that keep a low profile. It's clear today that because she was the only Spanish fluent Mexican born member of the team, it was Catalina who really enabled the mission and to actually meet its goals, particularly the segments of her journey with Ken where they had to negotiate both terrain and the local populations that he had really no experience with. In an interview that she gave in twenty Catalina told a journalist quote, I searched for the monarchs because of the love I have for all insects and all of nature, for the awe that they provoked in me in all the beautiful and ugly ways. I care about the truth and the marvelous way that nature works in all of us. And then here's the big reason that Holly wanted to do this episode. Holly is the one who researched it. In case that was not obvious, Uh, some of our listeners have probably guessed it. The monarch butterfly was classified as endangered on July two, that's about a week before we're recording this episode and a few weeks before it will come out. According to information reviewed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature or i U see in, in the last decade, monarch numbers have declined between twenty three and seventy two. It's a really wide swing, and that's due to variations in measurement, something that's pretty natural when you're trying to track an insect by site. The western monarch population has declined by n nine per cent since the nineteen eighties, and their eastern counterparts are doing slightly better. But the numbers are still really grave. Their decline since the nineteen eighties is eighty percent, so over just four decades they've gone from thriving to endangered. There are multiple contributors to these dramatic drops. One of the biggest is habitat loss. Logging and construction have wiped out forests that monarchs once visited along your migratory paths. Another is pesticides. Chemical treatments have not only killed butterflies, but also the milkweed plants that they need to survive. Climate change is another threat. During extreme weather events like storms, floods, and drought, butterflies die in large numbers. The United States has not yet listed the monarch as an endangered species through the Endangered Species Act, but many conservation and environmentalist groups across the country are lobbying for that listing. That listing would be an important step toward guiding recovery efforts because once the species is on the list, critical habitat areas become legally protected. That catalyzes the development of recovery plans as well as carrying them out. And there is some indication that numbers might be bolstering a little showing that in some areas the numbers in the population have gone up ever so slightly. This is just in the last year, but it isn't necessarily a sign that things will continue to get better on their own, but it does offer some hope that with conservation efforts in place, the population may continue to rebound. Today we know more than ever about monarchs, but we also still have a lot of questions. There have been projects that have involved genetic sequencing of the speci used to try to more fully understand their inner compass and their longevity shifts, as well as color differences. There have also been concerned that some studies of monarch DNA have accidentally used misidentified butterflies that are not monarchs. Yeah, there are a lot of butterfly species that kind of mimic the look of monarchs because it's beneficial to them to look like a toxic animal um and that there may have been some confusion in there. Mexico has taken steps to protect the monarchs over wintering locations in the country established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, and at the time of its founding, that reserve consisted of four forests totaling about sixty two square miles of land, but today that area has expanded. It's now two hundred seventeen square miles and most of this land is communally owned by the communities that live there, and efforts have been made to help transition the residents of those communities from their former occupations in fields like logging, which would have been detrimental to butterflies, two more conservation minded sources of income, such as bee keeping. There is also a growing eco tourism economy there. If you live in the US and you want to learn more about how you can help monarch populations, you can visit Monarch joint Venture dot org. It's a partnership of multiple agencies and conservation groups from across the country. Butterflies, yeah, about which I got very choked up at the end. Um. I have fun listener mail though about something that several people have reached out to me about on Twitter from one of our previous episodes, and that is Salmon Vertebrae. Oh yeah. This particular email is from our listener Elizabeth, who writes, Hye, Holly and Tracy, I love your podcast and my ears perked up at the mention of Salmon Vertebrae. As beads. This is a great idea with regard to your concern about smell. I have some advice. I am an our geologist. I won't say where Elizabeth works, just to be safe and preserve her privacy, and my specialty is zoo archaeology. On occasion, I have to turn an animal carcass into a skeleton for comparative purposes, so I have some relevant experience. Once you've cleaned the vertebrae in a very low simmer to soften and remove any soft bits, soak the vertebrae in a bath of hydrogen peroxide over the counter stuff is fine for a few minutes, and then let them dry. Repeat the peroxide bath until they don't smell. Do not use bleach that will make the vertebrae brittle over time and chalky. For your amusement, I enclose a picture of my cat, Eggs, who is helping me take notes from my weekly D and D game. Best regards, Elizabeth. Okay, Eggs is an orange tabby and adorable and I want to kiss Eggs. Um. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. This is great information. So for any of you that reached out to me on Twitter about ways that you might also do a salmon bead project. We'll see if I get around to it, but I still think it's pretty great. Uh, then that's how to do it. There have also been people that have sent me that amazing UM. I didn't take notes on it for this, but there's an artist who has done some really beautiful salmon bead garment projects that are just spectacularly beautiful. So UH, seek those out because they're worth looking at. Thank you again, Elizabeth. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at my heart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, you can do that on the I heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.