Lincoln Brower, Champion of the Monarch Butterfly, Dies at 86

Lincoln Brower, who spent six decades studying the remarkable migratory life cycle of the monarch butterfly and urging action to protect it, died on July 17 at his home in Roseland, Virginia. He was 86.

His wife, Linda S. Fink, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In countless scholarly papers, articles and interviews, Brower illuminated the story of the monarch, which can fly several thousand miles from places like Maine and the Dakotas to a winter home in the mountains of central Mexico. What makes the trip particularly astonishing is that the butterflies arriving in Mexico have never been to the wintering grounds; they are the descendants of monarchs that migrated from Mexico in a previous cycle. (The butterflies breed as they go north and then die.)

“If you’ve ever looked inside the brain of a butterfly, it’s about the size of a pinhead,” Brower said in a 1990 interview with The New York Times, “and yet the minicomputer inside that pinhead has all the necessary information to get them to Mexico without having been there before.”

Brower worked with groups in Mexico and with the Mexican government in the 1980s to establish sanctuaries to protect crucial fir forests where the butterflies mass from logging, although in later years he said illegal cutting continued. He also expressed alarm about the effects that herbicides and genetically engineered crops in the United States could have on the butterflies, which depend on the milkweed plant in the northern part of their life cycle.

“New visitors to the Mexican butterfly sites are awe-struck by the butterflies floating against the sky,” Fink, a professor of ecology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, said by email, “but Lincoln was heartsick because of the dramatic diminishment of their numbers since his expeditions in the 1970s and ‘80s.”

Lincoln Pierson Brower was born on Sept. 10, 1931, in Madison, New Jersey, to Bailey and Helen Pierson Brower. He grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, and was fascinated by butterflies and moths from a young age.

He received a bachelor’s degree in biology at Princeton University in 1953. He first began studying monarchs while in graduate school at Yale, where he received a Ph.D. in zoology in 1957.

Brower taught at Amherst College from 1958 to 1980 and at the University of Florida from 1980 to 1997. Since 1997 he had been a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College.

Although best known for his work on monarchs, Brower had other areas of expertise. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, with his first wife, Jane Van Zandt Brower, he studied adaptive coloration and mimicry in nature. He also examined river ecology and conservation, especially on the Connecticut River, and made two documentary films about river flooding.

He made his first of many trips to Mexico to research monarchs in 1977. He studied not only the migratory journey of the butterflies, but also things like the chemistry of their feeding habits.

“He loved butterflies all his life,” his son, Andrew Van Zandt Brower, a biologist at Middle Tennessee State University, said by email, “but the monarch allowed him to be one of the founders of the field of chemical ecology (or ecological chemistry, as he preferred), and to become the champion for conservation of the overwintering colonies in Mexico.”

Brower did not consider the monarch endangered, at least not yet. But he thought its spectacular migratory pattern was in jeopardy.

“Sedentary populations of monarchs occur naturally in the Caribbean islands, Trinidad, Bermuda and South America,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1998. “Monarchs will survive as a species in those places. But what we’re going to lose is this incredibly beautiful migration and everything that’s associated with it. So I have called this beautiful syndrome of the migration and overwintering cycle an ‘endangered biological phenomenon.'” Brower consulted with various groups on preservation issues, and with writer Barbara Kingsolver on her 2012 novel, “Flight Behavior,” in which migrating butterflies are a plot point.

“Lincoln impressed me as a rare sort of scientist,” Kingsolver wrote in an email, “in full possession of his facts but also appreciative of art and imagination as tools for engaging a wider public. He could follow me down the path of fictional invention and still keep all my facts straight.”

As Brower became known as the monarch’s best friend, he would often encounter one particular question.

“On occasion I will be asked in a public lecture, ‘Well, Professor Brower, tell me: What good is the monarch butterfly?'” he once said. “Needless to say, I am extremely irritated when anybody asks that question.”

But he had an answer for it, one that involved getting the questioner to ponder what kinds of things we value, and why.

“I’ve seen the Mona Lisa in Paris,” he’d say. “What good is the Mona Lisa? Really, it’s just a painting on a piece of paper. But we revere it as part of our culture and part of our tradition.”

He continued, “We’re too pragmatic in this country, and I think we need to realize that biological treasures such as the monarch are just as valuable as the Mona Lisa.”

Brower’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. His marriage to Christine Marie Moffitt ended in divorce in 1980. In addition to Fink, whom he married in 1990, and his son, he is survived by a daughter, Tamsin Brower Barrett, and two grandchildren.

Brower, his wife said, was always happy to talk to elementary school children about caterpillars and butterflies, and was also the kind of scholar who brought his work home with him. She said they ran an ultraviolet light at their house from April through October so that he could take a census of moth species. Brower and Fink recently recorded a brief oral history of his life. He recalled being disciplined in school for cutting class to collect a particular type of moth.

“I got suspended for a day and humiliated,” he said. “I had to sit in one classroom in one chair all day long.”

Fink asked, “Was it worth it?”

To which Brower replied, “Absolutely.”