5:01 Meeting May 20: All Hands on Deck to Conserve Monarch Butterflies

Please join us at the Pool and Yacht Club on May 20th as we hear from Ann Hobbie of Monarch Joint Venture. 

Most of us over the age  of 40 have a monarch butterfly story. Once ubiquitous in our area, monarchs were  familiar harbingers of summer, their black and yellow caterpillars familiar in the milkweed patches amidst our outdoor play spaces. They were fun to collect and rear, feeding them their host plant milkweed, and watching them grow, pupate and emerge as butterflies. 
 
Today, monarchs numbers have plummeted, and many summers hard to find. Monarchs  have always been perceived as a hardy species, evolved to migrate the perilous journey to the mountains of  central  Mexico for the winter. Recently, however, their overwintering numbers  have dropped so low that their migration -  one  of the longest in the animal kingdom - is considered a threatened phenomenon.
 
In this presentation, you'll learn more about  their individual life  cycle, their massive annual migration, and the reasons for their decline. I'll also introduce you to the work of the non-profit Monarch Joint Venture, once housed at the Monarch Lab (U of MN), but now its own national-level non-profit, operating out  of the Twin Cities. You'll get familiar with what MJV does, and learn of many different ways you and, perhaps, your business can  get  involved  and be one of the many requisite "hands on deck" to help  conserve monarchs and their habitat.

Ann Hobbie taught elementary school for thirteen years, where she began rearing monarchs with students. Ann helped develop the Monarchs in the Classroom curriculum with Dr. Karen Oberhauser’s Monarch Lab. She created subsequent schoolyard ecology curricula, and has taught related teacher professional development for twenty-five years, including for the North American Monarch Institute. She oversaw fundraising and installation of a playground and pollinator gardens at Groveland Elementary School, and served on the Transforming Central project, a major ecosystems services initiative for St. Paul Central High School and the Mississippi River watershed. In 2021, with illustrator Olga Baumert, Ann's picture book, Monarch Butterflies: Explore the Life Journey of One of the Winged Wonders of the World was released (Storey Publishing). Ann has served on the board of The Monarch Joint Venture, a national level conservation non-profit, for 7 years. Ann enjoys gardening, cycling, cooking and being a fitness trainer with youth and aging populations in St. Paul.

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