你如何帮助拯救帝王蝴蝶——以及地球? Mary Ellen Hannibal: How you can help save the monarch butterfly—and the planet

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Hi there. I'm in the habit of saying I would like it if butterflies could talk, but I've been recently reconsidering that, because we already have a pretty loud world.

Can you imagine if butterflies were yakking out there all over the place? But I would like to ask butterflies one question, which is, what is the meaning of some of the stories that we humans tell about them?

Because remarkably, all over the world, cultures have really similar stories, similar mythologies about butterflies having to do with the human soul. Some cultures tell us butterflies are carrying the souls of children who have died wrongly or too soon, and other cultures tell us that butterflies are carrying the souls of our ancestors among us.

This butterfly is called a Kallima inachus. On one side, it looks like a beautiful butterfly, and on the other side, it looks like a leaf, and it folds up like a leaf to elude predators.

So now you see it, now you don't, something hidden, something revealed. Maybe we got our ideas about the human soul from this butterfly.

So it's possible that butterflies have some sort of outsized role in our afterlife. But in this life, in this world, butterflies are in really serious trouble.

This is a moth. Moths and butterflies are related.

Moths generally fly at night. This is called "praedicta," because Darwin predicted that it must exist.

So today, more than 60 species of butterflies are endangered around the world, but even more than that, insects are declining, declining, declining. In the last 50 years, we've lost nearly 50 percent of the total number of bodies of insects.

Now this is a disaster. It could impact us in a more serious way more quickly than climate change, because butterflies don't do that much in the ecosystem that we depend on, but they do things for other creatures that we do depend on, and that's the same story with all insect life.

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