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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Even with the acknowledgement of the concept "flagship species" in conservation, I still don't get the obsession of monarch butterflies. The effort put into it seems to be pretty "narrow" for lack of better words (as in, it can't help much for other species). Did I miss something about how important it is?

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Monarch butterflies are beautiful and I want them to continue to exist. I can’t speak for others but for me that is reason enough.

You need better reasons than that. I doubt this is the case with monarch butterflies, but there are certainly lots of plant/animal species that are aesthetically pleasing but become invasive and wholly detrimental.

If I'm not mistaken, monarchs are poisonous due to their diet, so there's some potential for negative impact if they overrun a niche that some other animal was planning to eat.

Monarchs have migrated for thousands of years between remote locations, long before humans had a large impact on the environment.

Discovering and resolving problems for one species will very likely reveal or resolve problems for other species. It seems hard to lose.

Sometimes people just care about things that make us happy

people like LCMs: Large Charismatic Mammals. Tigers and elephants are easier to get funding to help compared to some ugly fish. People find most bugs gross and so are unlikely to help out. But the monarch is beautiful and many people remember them fluttering through their lives every year.

Anything to get people to care about insect biomass, imo.

> it can't help much for other species

Many of the solutions for reversing monarch also have positive side effects for other species.

All life is connected. One species can alert you to the deterioration of an entire ecosystem.

Nope, it's just that for people it's easy to just focus on a few species instead of the whole web.

It also allows people to think "Yeah, that one particular species had a good year, so everything is fine and we can go back to business as usual".

I for one don't hold my breath.

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