Monarch Butterflies Quotes

“Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re: global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role."
He replies:
"The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“In my family monarch butterflies are daughters of fire. They come from the sun carrying the souls of warriors who fought and died in battle, and return to feed on the nectar of flowers.”
― Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“Digitoxin
(sometimes referred to as digitoxin or digitalis)


This widely used heart medication is a cardiac glycoside used in the treatment of atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, and congestive heart failure. Found in the lovely purple bells of the foxglove plant and the gorgeous, velvety black wings of the monarch butterfly, digoxin is probably the most beautiful medication there ever was.”
― Margot Berwin, Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire

“Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. - Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots”
― Hope Jahren, The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2017: A Stellar Anthology of Essays Balancing Research with Humanity―Selected by Hope Jahren

“An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“This butterfly forest was a great breathing beast. Monarchs covered the trunks like orange fish scales. Sometimes the wings all moved slowly in unison. Once while she and Ovid were working in the middle of all that, he had asked her what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park? He had confessed these were not scientific thoughts.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered: Free EBook Sampler

“The monarch butterfly is a cardiotonic. It increases the tone of the heart muscle, causing more effective emptying of the chambers. The butterfly will help Diego. It will be good for him."
"Do we use monarchs, too- in the United States, I mean?" I asked desperately.
"You take digitalis from the digitoxin found in plants. Mostly foxglove. I use a digitalis-like toxin found in the monarch butterflies. Both have the same properties. The monarch lays its eggs on the milkweed plant, which also produces cardioglycosides. As the insects hatch and grow, they feed on the milkweed and ingest the heart medicine from the plant. They sequester it in their bodies, never using it and never excreting it."
"Why do they do that?"
"To keep predators away. Digitalis has a bitter taste that keeps the birds away.”
― Margot Berwin, Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire