Of Bombs and Butterflies
41:08 Share

WNYC Studios is supported by Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations and at trial. When the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.

Radiolab is supported by Progressive Insurance. What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is.

Every day, our world gets a little more connected.

but a little further apart. But then, there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amica. Empathy is our best policy.

♪♪♪

Listener supported. WNYC Studios.

I'll start. No, no, I think you should start because this is your story. Okay, I'm Latif. I'm Jad. This is Radiolab, and today... We've been working on the story a long time, and it feels...

Kind of disproportional because it's like, it's a very, it's a, it's a big story about a little thing. Yeah. I'm going to pretend I don't know what the little, the little thing of which you speak. What is the story that you're about to tell me and about what? This story is about a tiny, fragile critter doing its best to survive in a hostile world and whether we should help it or let it die.

Damn, okay. Okay, so let us begin with... Okay, numbers are running at the bottom. So now I'll just use this like a phone. Nick Haddad. So maybe let's just start with a phone call, I think, right? Yeah, start from the beginning. Early 2000s. Nick is sitting in his office. North Carolina State University. This was actually his first job as a professor. Yeah, I was a professor in zoology. Still pretty new, young guy. And one day he's sitting in his new office when the phone rings.

And on the other end of the line is someone from Fort Bragg, the U.S. Army base. He was like, why the hell is the Army calling me? Yeah, when I got a call from the Army, I for sure furled my brow. The first thing the Army guy says is, look, there's this endangered butterfly on our base. The thing's on the precipice of extinction. And we need your help to save it.

Why would the army care about this one butterfly? Well, because this butterfly, you can't find it anywhere else. Fort Bragg is its only known habitat on planet Earth. Since it's listed as endangered, the military has to save it. Like, that's the law. That's the Endangered Species Act, which is why they're calling someone like Nick Haddad to try to help them save it. Now, Nick...

He's an ecologist. He's a conservationist. But... I'm not an entomologist. I don't know much about other insect species. Technically, he's not even a butterfly guy. Had you heard of that butterfly before? I had never heard of the butterfly before. At the time...

I probably could have named one rare butterfly. Everything else was, you know, just common. So he looks this thing up, you know, just to see what he's working with. And the name of this butterfly is the St. Francis Seder butterfly.

Is that a D? S-A-T-Y-R. S-A-T-Y-R. S-A-T-Y-R. Oh. That sounds like a mythological creature with half a horse and a gargoyle or something. As opposed to like a Passover dinner. Okay. So it was first discovered and identified in 1983. At the time, it was estimated there were less than 100 butterflies left. Wow. This butterfly had a feature that just played right into my hand.

They're like perfectly timed to an academic year. He was like, you know what? After I'm done teaching for the year, I'll just drive down there a few days in the summer. Maybe it'll take a summer or two. Sounds like a fun little puzzle. So what was a no-brainer for me? No big deal. He says yes. I was confident that, yeah, I was going to be the person to set it on the right path. I mean, there was no question to me that I was the person who could oversee its recovery.

I will say there I'm a naive optimist. Naive because it's almost 20 years later. He is still trying to save this little flappy creature. He often loses sleep over it. And even though this little butterfly is about the size of a quarter, this thing has entirely upturned his idea of life and death and creation and destruction. Okay.

2002, Nick goes to Fort Bragg. To start off, he just needs to figure out like how many of these St. Francis Stater butterflies are there on Fort Bragg. So he and his students, they basically like trace along 40 miles of creeks and streams. And the first year we determined the population size to be about 1,000 butterflies outside the artillery ranges.

Wow. He's like, huh? Oh, wow. This is like actually not as bad as I thought. A thousand. I don't know. Does that seem like a lot or a few? Pretty good. Well, it turns out it's just almost nothing. I mean, if you rounded up a thousand butterflies and could just hold them in your hands, you could smash them down to the size of

I don't know, a softball or something. So not great. But he's like, that's still more butterflies than the hundred that that original paper said that there were. This thing seems to be surviving on its own. Let's just wait, see what happens, come back next summer. My approach to conservation was literally hands off. So they come back the next year and count is slightly higher. They're like, okay, great. But then two years later, things started going worse.

like really badly. And then it was down and down from there. And they find out that one kind of little thriving, vibrant population they had, it's gone. So they're like, okay, what just happened? Nick does a little detective work and what he figures out is it's due to flooding. Was flooded over by a beaver. There are beavers at the base. Beavers build dams.

dams cause water to build up, and then that water is enough to drown the caterpillars who are eating the grass like sedges. So obviously no caterpillars, no butterflies. So Nick pieces that together, but pretty quickly another population goes down. And that one was because of a catastrophic wildfire that just scorched everything. These fires often get started because of the artillery range. And as you can imagine, these little paper-thin wings of a butterfly are

do not do well with fire. So here I was just keeping a hands-off approach to the butterfly's habitat and the butterfly started to decline. So he's thinking, okay, so my hands-off approach didn't work. We need to do something. Maybe I have to go in and protect it.

and it seems pretty clear the problems are flooding and fire, so let's just remove those problems. So how does he get rid of those problems? Well, the fire is a bit harder to manage because it's more unpredictable, but the beavers, he was like, yeah, we need to do something about those beavers.

There's truly only one person fit for this job. In my office, I became where I was kind of the beaver liaison for our office. Brian Ball, a biologist who works with the Army. So like when there's any kind of beaver issues. He's your guy. So Brian brings out the big guns.

A beaver deceiver, basically a pipe through the dam. And a beaver deceiver is what they do is they take the dam and then they basically like just punch a hole and then put a pipe through the dam so that like the water is still going through, but the beaver doesn't realize. So it's a beaver deceiver. But it did not always deceive the beaver. And we destroyed the dam four or five times. They basically go in with their hands and just break up these dams.

That didn't always work. I've put fences up, I think, four times. Still, the enemy would not give up. So, in one case, like, they removed the beaver. I guess you could put it that way, yeah. They killed the beaver. Anyway, once the beaver is gone, no more disturbances. Nick thought, okay, now the butterflies can come back. But then...

I'd call to get reports from my graduate students to get daily updates on, were these butterflies in the places we'd hoped? Were their abundances high enough to sustain the population? And the answer to both those questions is no. The butterflies just disappeared. He can't even tell why anymore. Another population was lost, the next year another, the next year another. There are years where he goes out to places where butterflies were thriving the last time he was there.

And now he doesn't even see a single one. It was very surreal. I mean, it was almost in an instant. Yeah, it was mind-blowing how quick it happened. So they went from, in the early 80s, 100 butterflies to the early 2000s, 1,700 butterflies to now in 2011, 75 butterflies.

What had we done wrong? Nick himself is in really bad shape. Like the way he talks about it, he feels guilty. I mean, it was frustrating. It was humiliating. Here I am, the conservation biologist, the scientist thinking, I'm the one, I'm like the savior for this butterfly. And yet exactly the opposite is happening.

Like, imagine you're inheriting a thing at its best, and then you watch it, and it slowly is slipping out of your fingers, and then it gets to its worst it's ever been. Yeah, absolutely, it weighs on you. If we mess this up, you know, this thing could disappear forever. Well, that's it for the butterfly. It's like, oh, if this now goes down, it's me that's let planet Earth down on this. This butterfly was going extinct on my watch.

So then what do you do? So what I haven't told you is that Nick had a sort of Hail Mary shot, which is that back in the early 90s, long before Nick actually got there, some army people had seen these butterflies on an artillery testing range.

But that area was closed off to civilians. Nick had never been allowed access. Why was it closed off to him? These are very serious places. Like, these are deadly places. At some points in the year, bombs are going off 24-7. Like, just to give you a sense, like,

There was an explosion where soldiers, multiple soldiers, special ops soldiers, three of them went to the hospital. One of them died. And while Nick was working there, they had had an incident where a civilian had snuck onto the base, was trying to salvage like scrap metal from old bombs. And blew himself up and died. Oh, my God. Given that circumstance, of course, the military had to clamp down.

So very dangerous place. And he doesn't even know the butterflies are still there. Like they were last seen decades ago. But Nick and his biologist colleagues feel like this is just so crucial for the survival of the species. So he's like, I have to have to go find out. They beg the folks in charge of the base to let them on the artillery range. And the powers that be agreed. So I arrived in North Carolina last night.

Now, the tape you're hearing, Nick recorded it back in 2020. OK, just went through badging. No problem. That was quick. And that first time he was allowed to go on the condition that he go with. So I call it sounds of freedom. We have the sounds of freedom going off 24 hours a day here. Tracy Johnson. My expertise in the military was fantastic.

You know, ordnance. They're called EOD, explosive ordnance disposal. What is ordnance? Bombs, hand grenades, rockets, pretty much anything that goes boom. That's how I was in a situation where I was able to meet Nick. And so for the first time... Here I go. Nick is allowed to enter the artillery range. The first trip, I remember it in detail. My eyes were wide open. I see...

150 soldiers. Lines of soldiers were pointing their guns. Soldiers are being parachuted out of planes onto landing fields. Well, thankful I'm not that guy. I only have to carry a butterfly net. The thing you really notice is the explosions. Bombing areas continuously bombed or, you know, artillery. Absolutely. Constant detonation of ordnance.

Stop here waiting for confirmation that we can go into the range. They have to wait for a green light to tell them that live fire has ceased. So eventually, green light turns on. And I'm like, all right, let's go. We head out to look at what the butterfly's habitat looked like. And they start walking. They follow me because I got to go first.

And make sure that the path is clear, that there's nothing dangerous that they're going to step on. First Tracy, then Brian, who's pointing the way. And then... I go in. Nick. And he's sort of in his head, he's picturing... What he told me he was picturing was this like...

this pockmarked moonscape. Like, you know the image they have in like every high school history textbook of like World War I trench warfare? Bombed out trees and like just dirt and mud and like holes in the ground, like that kind of thing? Yeah. So that's what he's expecting. Oh shoot, just stepped over a...

big coordinates. I'm just looking on the ground for things that I might step on that I shouldn't be stepping on. And there's definitely some of that. That one makes me nervous. I walked with... They're pretty sensitive. Wait, what do you mean sensitive? Trepidation. Well, it's not unusual for me to stumble into the water. But as they kept moving deeper and deeper into the range... We ended up in this swampy area. Oh, man. It's...

It's going through just a dense thicket of shrubs and by them getting scratched up by thorns and... You know, the growth gets thicker in places. Poisonous humectants end up in my face. There are more animals creeping around. I've seen the biggest snake I think I've ever seen in my life that day. Huge cottonmouth. A fat boy. Yeah, he's big. I've always been kind of a snake, frog, salamander type person. And so I'm the one that's always looking for... Oh, shit. Oh, that was...

Except on one end of a log. Everybody's a little jumpy out here today. So we break through, crash through the vines. This is pretty open and wet. Nick says they came to these pockets where... Sedge abundance is picking up. Honestly, my mouth was agape that it was so beautiful. What? What?

It is a healthy wetland forest. Do you know what this flower is, Brian? All kinds of flowers. Hundreds of orchids. Beautiful purple flowers. There are all these birds like... Bobwhites in the background. Bobwhite quail. Red ticated woodpecker. It's like a symphony going on for sure. It is a garden of Eden. It really was. I mean, it was incredible. ♪

So he's walking through this area. My head's, you know, watching the ground and his head's up in the air, you know, looking for the butterflies. And pretty quickly, Tracy, she goes, Oh, wow. What do we have here? Oh, is that one of your butterflies? This little brown butterfly sitting on the underside of a leaf. He's like, yeah.

Yeah, that's one of my butterflies. Let's see if it goes back to this flower. Within a matter of seconds, I saw St. Francis Seder. Oh, flying again. And then I walked on for, you know, a few more feet. Oh, here it is, here it is. Oh, there it is, right below you. And there was another and another and another. So there were 75 off the artillery range that he was, like, preciously protecting and, like, holding onto as the last gasp of the species. And in 15 minutes...

He just saw 50 of them. There they were. These things are thriving here. Like they're thriving. I was exhilarated. I mean, that's the only feeling I had is, well, exhilaration and relief. They appeared to be safe.

Something that was happening inside the artillery ranges actually did a better job of managing habitats for the butterfly than whatever we were doing outside the artillery ranges. Like, why are they thriving here and not out there? What's different? What caused that?

Like the butterflies are cheating on him or something. Like he's like, what do they have that I don't? Like what was the artillery range giving to you that I was not? And what he starts to realize is basically that like everything he knows about the St. Francis Seder, everything he knows about conservation, everything he knows about life and death is wrong. So first...

There's basically no people to muck with the ecosystem. Fort Bragg has got a lot of areas that aren't disturbed and haven't been disturbed for hundreds of years, you know, thanks to the ranges. And that creates that little pocket of opportunities.

Because there's no people, they leave beaver. So beavers, they create dams. Those dams, they do flood, they do drown those caterpillars, but they also do other things. Beaver abandon the dams, and it's behind those abandoned dams where sediments have accumulated that provide rich soil that then plants can grow into, including and especially the food for the butterfly is a big buffet. ♪

But actually, the even more surprising thing is when it comes to the bombs, the butterflies weren't surviving on the testing ranges despite the bombs. They were surviving because of the bombs. How is that possible? These are like the tiniest, flimsiest little creatures in the world.

So the St. Francis Shader, they live in an environment in North Carolina that helps plants grow quickly. And so these grassy wetlands aren't grassy wetlands for long. Soon vines grow in, then shrubs grow in, then trees grow in, and

So the explosions, the gunfire. And those fires kill butterflies, but they also thin out the trees.

So thinner trees means more sunshine, more sunshine and more space for grassy sedges to grow. More grassy sedges means more food for caterpillars. More food for caterpillars means more caterpillars means more butterflies. Ordinance, they don't create a less natural world. They create a more natural world. So the thing that he thought he needed to protect the butterflies from are actually the thing that's making them stronger. Exactly.

And so this is where I had my biggest epiphany. Going into the artillery range, what I realized is my perception of butterflies as fragile was totally misplaced. And like this whole time, he was exactly 180 degrees wrong. So he basically learns from this. He's like, okay, let's fucking go. I don't love saying fucking, but it just does work here.

I basically went from no disturbance in our sights to all disturbance in our sights. He and Brian, they're like, let's get in there with chainsaws. Let's tear up some stuff. Cutting down trees. Cut it up, buck it on our shoulders and take it out. And then they would build dams as if they were beavers. Dam them up. Let's make a big mud hole. Let's dam up some streams and make sure we get some water on them. Hey, and while we're at it, let's start some fires.

Brian, a biologist with the Army, was telling me he basically goes around on the back of an ATV with like a flamethrower. Not that bad, not that bad. There's a lot of science to it and there's a lot of art, but it's pretty close to a flamethrower, yeah. And so we were able to create the wetlands that the butterflies needed. After that, they wait for a little bit. It took us about two years to see the semblance of success.

Oh, you saw the first one. All right. So, of course, when I'm counting them, I'm in competition with Brian to see the most butterflies. And I saw three at the last sight. I'll usually give him a few before I start counting just to make him feel better. Oh, wow. So it's a head start kind of a thing. Yeah, I got my head start. Yeah, yeah. I'm a giver. After Nick started using those lessons to save the butterflies, the population off of the ranges—

has rebounded from less than 100 to over 3,000. I got another one. So they're doing better than they've ever done before. Wow. Oh, shoot, I see two more right now. So that's six, seven for me. When the butterflies start flying, well, that's exhilarating every time I see them. So now we're at 11, 12, 13, 13. Okay, that's 14 then. What I realized in the end is that

You have to kill some butterflies to save butterfly populations. Saving and killing as these two discrete things that are opposites and separate from each other, but they're just so weirdly marbled all up in each other. And I hate saying that because...

When there's only 3,000 butterflies left in the world, how can you justify killing any butterflies? But with the next step of new habitat regenerating that will be good for the butterflies. Better. That'll actually create, foster more than you're killing. Yes, exactly. There it is. Brian, if I don't get it, it's coming right towards you. All right, 24, 25, 28, 29.

30, 35, dang they're everywhere in here. 38. Oh my gosh.

Well, there is one, but in a place I never see them. This one is about... So this is weird to admit, and I've never actually done this in a story before, but that was supposed to be the ending. What you just heard, that was the story I pitched, that was the story I reported, that was the story I wanted to tell. But then as I was finishing the reporting, I talked to somebody, somebody integral to the St. Francis Seder story.

who took Nick's lesson, killing in order to save life springing forth from death, and pushed it further, took it to a whole new level, a level that shocked me and that made Nick very uncomfortable. That's after the break. This is Bree calling from Austin, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

Science Reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

My Wrangler jeans from Walmart are legit my favorite go-to pants.

They got that slim cut that's always fresh for going out. Hey, what's up? They're durable enough, even for my shift, and stretchy enough for when I want to kick back and chill with a movie. So basically, they can do it all, and on my budget. I mean, come on. You really can't beat all that. Shop your Wrangler pants at Walmart.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so now I want to do something sort of different. Yeah, go for it. Something a little weird. I'm going to start the same story over, but from a different point of view. Okay. June 2nd, 1983, a sweltering... June 2nd, 1983. Yeah, it is a sweltering day. I was 10 years old.

Not that this has anything to do with me, so continue. It was a sweltering day at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A 19-year-old soldier is tromping through the muddy wetland, and he notices something. It's brown, and it's about the size of a quarter, and it's fluttering through the tall grass around him, and it is a butterfly. Hmm.

Now, this soldier, his name is Thomas Kroll. He has been a butterfly collector since he was six years old. And he knows enough about them to look at this one and say, this is something different. And a few years later, he actually ends up co-authoring a paper saying basically it is a new subspecies of butterfly. Very few left, all on Fort Bragg. And because of that, it says in the paper, we need to protect this thing.

And he also names it. So he calls it the St. Francis Seder after the patron saint of animals. Now that paper is the thing that Nick, our guy from the first part, based the last almost 20 years of his professional life on. It helps get the butterfly on the endangered species list. And that's

why the military ends up calling Nick and then Nick gets involved and you know the rest of that story. But what we're going to do right now is follow Tom's story. He leaves Fort Bragg and becomes a real estate appraiser. So this is now we're in kind of the early 90s.

Around this time, U.S. Fish and Wildlife raided Tom's house. Oh, before I forget, these are the butterflies that we charged out on. Oh, those are really nice. So we talked to a guy who was actually on that raid. His name is Chris Nagano. I spent 27 years working on endangered species at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Okay, great. So...

Turns out Tom was not just an enthusiast of butterflies. He was an avid collector, including collecting butterflies that you're not supposed to collect. Butterflies from protected sites, listed butterflies. So Chris and his team show up at Tom's house in Tucson, Arizona. We got there. His father was there. You know, we said we're fishing wildlife here to execute a warrant. Is Tom here? And he said, no, he's out collecting. So they kind of start going through stuff. He had butterflies.

books and articles all over the bedroom. And about an hour into the search, he got home with the animals he had been collecting. And, you know, there were a bunch of them. But after getting over the, you know, surprise of there being a bunch of federal agents in his house, he agrees to walk them through his collection. Yeah. Butterfly by Butterfly.

You know, and his collection rivaled major museums in the world. He had a room filled with cabinets, and the cabinets were filled with butterflies, almost 100,000 specimens, including super rare ones. I mean, the guy was just a machine. You know, I could point, you know, to a random...

any one of the thousands and Tom could go, yeah, you know, I caught that on this trip and, you know, it was, you know, feeding on this kind of flower. Like he just was very, very, he knew his collection very, very well. You know, these guys, I mean, they know a lot.

But there's one detail in all of this that really, really stuck with me. So Tom, they didn't just bust Tom. They busted a couple of other collectors too. And in so doing, they found letters that all of these collectors were sending to each other, including Tom was sending, talking about, you know, where to find the best butterflies and how to evade detection. And one of those letters from Tom, the way he signed it was, yours in mass murder, Tom. Whoa.

Yours in mass murder. I mean, the guy who discovered this butterfly and wrote a paper saying, like, there's so few of them left, we need to protect them, also is signing letters saying, yours in mass murder, and is involved in this, like, massive butterfly poaching ring. Like, I felt like I just needed to talk to him. Totally, yeah. And I was, like, trying to track him down. I could not find him, could not find him, could not find him. ♪

And then I found him. Thomas Crowe. Hi, Thomas. How you doing? Do you go by Thomas, Tom? Oh, Thomas, fine. I should say really quickly that Tom, he argued he was confused by the laws. He did plead guilty in exchange for essentially a slap on the wrist, no jail time. But when I told him I was interested in talking about the St. Francis Seder, which was not one of the butterflies he was charged for, he said,

he was super game to talk. This is a far larger story than I think you initially signed up for. And that's, I was like, okay, let's do it. Okay. I,

I was 19 years old, and I started collecting butterflies on Fort Bragg. So he told me the whole story about finding the butterfly. These looked a little different. So that day I caught maybe about eight or so. But then when he got to the paper that he wrote about it... You know, unfortunately, looking back, I was manipulated. He actually claimed that the reviewers and the editors at that journal...

pushed him into saying things that he says weren't true, or at least leaving out, you know, key details. This is important. For example, the paper says the butterfly is only on Fort Bragg. Tom says he saw them in other places, too. In a couple places, I caught individuals off base of Fort Bragg.

And on top of that... I had caught hybrid or intermediate specimens between that and the Georgia satyr, and they left that out of the paper. The way that it came across in the paper, it's like, oh my God, it's about to die. But the way Tom puts it, if it's mixing with other species... You know, this is natural selection taking place. It's not dying, it's just assimilating into the family next door. This butterfly really isn't going extinct. It's going extinct in that form, but it's genetic...

you know, that everybody seems to be concerned about continues on in another population. So basically what Tom is saying is that the dwindling populations of this butterfly are just no big deal, which for me as a reporter, I'm like, he just pulled the rug out from the entire story I just did. Did he convincingly pull out the rug or did he? I mean, I mean, I,

Honestly, I wasn't sure. Like, I mean, I checked out the journal, totally scientifically legit. I talked to the editor at the time. He remembered it, said that there was nothing weird about the review or the editing. He still stands by it. And when it comes to the science, you know, the things that Tom says he actually saw, I figured I should just put it in front of Nick. Have you ever met him or talked to him before? Never met him.

Okay. So he started out by telling him, first of all, Tom said he found St. Francis Satyrs off the base. Off of Fort Bragg. Wow. But he didn't write about that. And at first, Nick was like, that would be so great. That is critically important knowledge if he identified the place. But then Tom was a bit vague about where exactly. And then when he named a certain spot, Nick was like, oh my...

My team and I, we already looked there. We're working on that right now. And a whole bunch of other places nearby. We've searched in the most likely places and based on our best knowledge and the guidance that we can get from remote sensing or from experts in the area, but they had not found even a single one. Never found it. Okay. Another thing he said. Then I told him that Tom said that the St. Francis Seder was just mixing with this other group, hybridizing with the Georgia Seder.

No, that's not happening. In this case, Nick was just like, nope, no way. We've thought about that a lot. We've actually studied the Georgia satyr. We've tried to figure out if this is happening. But these two butterflies... They're different in how they look. They're different in how they behave. They're different in their DNA. And they're different in where they are on the landscape. You know, there's some remote chance, but no, they do not hybridize.

So Nick had me back to, okay, if you look at the science, if you look at the studies, you look at the evidence, this thing is super rare. And it is not mixing with the neighbors. So it really is, like, if we don't save it, it really is going to disappear. And I actually put all this back in front of Tom, Nick's reaction, and Tom was shocked.

Not convinced. You know, how do we know, you know, what its true range is or if people find it? Okay, so did you believe at the time that this ought to have been an endangered species? Absolutely not. Did I ever think that this thing should have been listed as endangered? Absolutely not. I mean, I got the sense, like a pretty clear sense, that he sees conservation science as totally politicized. Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's a chunk of that that it has to do with his past experience. But there was also something that ran deeper than that, I think. You know, he was arguing that little subspecies of butterflies like the St. Francis tater that are so small, so marginal, you

It just isn't worth the effort to save it at that point. There isn't. I hate to say it, but insects, not in aggregate, but as individual species, they're minor players. Picking one or two entities and saying these are endangered, it becomes ludicrous. Sounds like a good way to justify collecting species to extinction and have a better collection. Which is a fair point by Nick. Hybridization.

But at the same time, this was a question I was asking myself as I was learning about Nick's work, you know, nearly 20 years of tromping through bomb fields. And it's a question I've heard lots of people ask, including some scientists. You know, should we be picking out these little itty bitty things that there's just a few left of and, you know, put a lot of resources into trying to save them?

Insects are vast. I mean, just in terms of butterflies in North America, there's over 700 kinds. There's several hundred different additional subspecies. And this just really becomes one of thousands of other types of butterflies. Like from Tom's POV, it's like, if I hadn't discovered this thing in the first place, you wouldn't even care about it. What I'm saying is there's better places to put your limited conservation dollars.

This is an argument that Nick has to face all the time. Honestly, I struggle with this one because you can, like St. Francis Seder, you cannot make the argument that there are pollinators or...

prey in their ecosystem that matter to anything. St. Francis Seder matters to zero flowers. Dragonflies and spiders eat St. Francis Seders, but there's so few of them, like they can make a fraction of one individual dragonfly's diet. It's not easy to come up with a practical or feel-good reason to save a creature like the St. Francis Seder. But especially...

As we are now in the middle of what scientists call the insect apocalypse, which, you know, because of pollination and food chains and everything, you know, ripples out into a wider ecological disaster. Folks like Nick have to find like a little spot of territory to protect in that larger battle, right? He has to answer like, why should we care about this butterfly? And Nick, he really just lands on a simple moral point. What's caused them to decline is in some...

background rate of evolution. It's people that have drained wetlands, have put fields, farm fields or houses on butterfly or next to butterfly habitat. And it's like once we find out that it exists, like to do nothing is to let it die. The reason to protect them in the end is an ethical one. We people shouldn't be the cause of extinction. This is...

On us! Yeah. Have you seen any yet? I've not seen any. It's super wet out here today. Whoa, shit! Two. This is where I'm going to see them, right here. Still nothing. Quick note, in the time since we started reporting this, the number of St. Francis satyrs has gone back down for mysterious reasons. They're hovering around 200. So Nick, once again, has a fight on his hands. In a half hour, I'd expect to see...

I don't know, at least 30 butterflies. Seen two so far. Wading through chest-high ferns. Now I'm in a place where on a

This story was reported by me, Latif Nasser, produced by Rachel Cusick, with music from Jeremy Bloom and mix help from Arianne Wack, as usual. And then there's more things you're going to say, right? Yeah, and special thanks to Snooki Pooley, Sita Escalano, Jeffrey Glassberg, Margo Williams, Mark Roman, Elizabeth Long, the Public Affairs and Endangered Species branches at Fort Bragg.

Before we go, I just want to say that coming up, not now, but in a week, is a baller series from our producer Simon Adler starting next week. So exciting. And it's not about butterflies, but it is about a thing that you might have overlooked, a piece of technology that no one thinks about.

but it actually determined everything about the world as we live in from the internet to the little phone in your hand that's listening to my voice right now. And Simon is going to take you literally around the world.

And through time. Yes. Through time, through space. And he wrote all the music for this thing. And just like it was a true feat of one man doing everything. And it's kind of mind blowing. I know that we will disappoint you inevitably at some point at Radiolab. But it won't happen in the next five weeks. That I can assure you. So, yeah.

What a promise. Don't unsubscribe yet. Don't unsubscribe yet. That starts next week. Okay, we should go. Okay. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambandham, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Tanya Chawla, Shima Oliai, Sarah Sonbach, and Candice Wong.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.