Jackie Minett is a tour guide at Butterfly World in Coconut Creek, Florida, dubbed the “butterfly capital of the world.” She leads children and seniors, some tourists, some Floridians, around the gardens to gawk at butterflies: zebra longwings, emperor butterflies, and, most recognizable of all, monarchs.
South Florida’s monarch population is one of the few known non-migratory populations in North America. Minett jokes that’s because “they have it so good” and “it’s like people retiring in Florida.”
But when the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the migrating monarch butterfly as endangered in late July, South Floridians like Minett began to wonder what that meant for the region’s more settled subspecies.
