Butterflies Behind Bars: Raising An Endangered Species From Prison

Inside greenhouse facilities at women's prisons in Washington State, a group of incarcerated women are working daily to rescue an endangered butterfly called the Taylor's checkerspot from the edge of extinction, and since the program began in 2011 they have raised and released more than 80,000 caterpillars into restored prairie habitats across the Pacific Northwest. The butterfly, which has lost roughly 99 percent of its grassland habitat to development, agriculture, and urban growth, was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2013, and without the prison program conservation experts say it might already be gone. Each spring, wildlife conservationists bring wild female butterflies carrying eggs into the greenhouse, and the incarcerated technicians raise the larvae through multiple growth phases over many months, monitoring eggs daily, tracking family lines to preserve genetic diversity, logging growth rates, and building datasets that contribute directly to conservation science. The work is meticulous, repetitive, and by all accounts deeply meaningful to the women doing it.

The program is run through the Sustainability in Prisons Project, a collaboration between the Washington State Department of Corrections and Evergreen State College that now operates across every prison in the state, offering programs ranging from beekeeping to raising endangered frogs and turtles. The co-director of the project notes that access to education reduces recidivism by 43 percent and that connection to nature improves health and wellbeing, making the butterfly work both an ecological and a human intervention at the same time. The incarcerated technicians participate in annual conservation conferences, go on excursions to watch their larvae be released in the wild, and in some cases present their findings to conservation professionals as peers. One of the program's earliest participants earned a master's degree in public administration after her release and now works as an analyst in the state legislature. The butterflies are coming back, and so are some of the people who helped save them.

Source:https://reasonstobecheerful.world/prison-conservation-butterflies/