Abstract
What makes a flagship species effective in engaging conservation donors? Large, charismatic mammals are typically selected as ambassadors, but a few studies suggest butterflies—and monarchs in particular—may be even more appealing. To gather more information about people’s responses to monarchs, we conducted an empirical study of member submissions to a successful conservation campaign, the Monarch Story Campaign, conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The set of 691 stories along with their associated demographic and donation data was analyzed in a mixed-methods study using qualitative analysis and tests of association. The results showed that people often described encounters with monarchs in childhood and as adults. They expressed strong, positive emotions, and lauded the monarch’s beauty and other “awe-inspiring” qualities and expressed wonder at their lifecycle (i.e., metamorphosis and migration). They also raised conservation themes of distress at monarch loss, calls for action, and caretaking, such as being “fragile” and “in need.” Sharing personal encounters was associated with current efforts to save the species and more past financial donations, while a second pattern tied more donations to awe at the monarch’s mass migration. These results imply that conservation campaigns built around species people encounter may build lifelong awareness, concern, and actions towards conservation.
Highlights
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are among the most popular insect species in the world, and are recognizable in gardens and fields across North America (Oberhauser et al 2018)
People in that study had negative views of caterpillars, attributing harm and economic damage to them, and only 63% said butterflies benefitted humans. These findings suggest that butterflies have potential as flagship species for conservation programs, but we must better understand people’s responses to them
These patterns emerge from considering the intercorrelations among the five identified Principal Components Analysis (PCA) factors (Table 2), the theme clusters arising from the qualitative analysis (Table 3), and the significant correlations with demographic variables (Table 4)
Summary
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are among the most popular insect species in the world, and are recognizable in gardens and fields across North America (Oberhauser et al 2018). Articles about monarchs appear frequently in the popular press; for example, the New York Times published (on average) one each month from 1995 to 2015 (cf Gustafsson et al 2015). In the 1950s, Fred and Norah Urquhart chose monarchs for the first citizen science research project on, “Where do monarchs go in the winter?” (Urquhart and Urquhart 1976). Thanks to school programs and large-scale monitoring projects, public awareness of monarchs has grown over generations who are interacting with monarchs “in the wild” (Young-Isebrand et al 2015; Gustafson et al 2015; Lewandowsky and Oberhauser 2017)
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