With only one percent of it’s native habitat remaining, the Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterfly has a long roadto recovery ahead of it. Photo credit: Keegan Curry

In a small, specially-built laboratory at the Mission Creek Corrections Center forWomen, an incarcerated technician feeds a tiny butterfly with a cotton swab.
The butterfly, with a fuzzy grey-brown body, orange face and antenna, andorange, white and black checker-pattern wings is an endangered Taylor’sCheckerspot Butterfly. Over a year, incarcerated technicians will care for theCheckerspots, collecting data and maintaining optimal conditions at all stages ofgrowth so a new generation of caterpillars can be released into native prairie
habitat to help restore their numbers. But a population increase in endangered
butterflies is just one of the significant impacts that has come out of
the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a special collaboration between theWashington Department of Corrections and The Evergreen State
College says Master of Environmental Studies (MES) student, Keegan Curry.
https://www.thurstontalk.com/2019/03/26/the-butterfly-effect-evergreen-grad-student-explains-theripples-of-species-recovery/At Mission Creek Corrections Center, Keegan Curry works in thebutterfly rearing structure. Photo credit: Melissa Johnson

For more than a decade, the mission of SPP has
been “to empower sustainable change by bringing
nature, science, and environmental education
into prisons.” Some of the rewards the SPP
partnership offers include: mountains of data andresearch for scientific and academic communities;
education and training; new-found purpose andempowerment for incarceratedindividuals; opportunities for Evergreen students
to work on social and environmental issues; andcollaborations between state, federal, and educational partners. The butterfly
program is the accumulation of many years of hard work, Keegan explains.

Collaboration Between Organizations
In 2011, the SPP partnered with the Washington Department of Fish andWildlife, the Oregon Zoo, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the Department of Defense,
to bring a butterfly-rearing facility to Mission Creek Corrections Center for
Women, a minimum-security prison in Belfair.
“The partnership was an opportunity to take captive rearing activities at theOregon Zooand implement the same protocols and training at the prison,” says
Keegan. The collaboration relied on state biologists, zoo keepers, DOC staff, andEvergreen students supporting the incarcerated technicians as they gained skills
and education all while helping restore an endangered butterfly species to thewild.
The Taylor’s Checkerspot lives on prairies and oak woodlands in the PacificNorthwest region. “Almost 99 percent of those prairies have been developed forhousing, agriculture or other uses,” says Keegan. “Only about one percent of
the Taylor’s Checkerspot’s historic habitat remains, and what remains is in
https://www.thurstontalk.com/2019/03/26/the-butterfly-effect-evergreen-grad-student-explains-theripples-of-species-recovery/isolated areas, at risk for degradation.” In Washington, there are about eight
populations remaining overall, and the single largest of the remaining
populations is on Joint Base Lewis McChord (JBLM). “JBLM has been very
supportive of the recovery efforts for this butterfly,” Keegan adds.

Important Work that’s Working
A captive rearing program takes species that are threatened or endangered in
the wild, in this case, the Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterfly, and raises them incaptivity then releases the species into the wild to help repopulate areas where
the species has faced declining numbers. This work is time consuming andlaborious, and requires dedication on the part of the scientific technicians.
Incarcerated technicians care for these endangered
Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterflies at all stages of life.
The pupae are seen here. Photo credit: Keegan Curry

It takes a year for a butterfly to live afull life cycle, and in that time, theincarcerated technicians witness thespecies up close and personal. “A lot ofincarcerated people have never been
told that they are good at something, or that they can follow their curiosity andit will lead them somewhere beneficial,” explains Keegan. “When the SPP brings
science, nature and education into the prisons, we are saying we trust you, we
believe in you and we see you as equal partners in this important work ofpreserving biodiversity.”
Unlike a typical prison work program, this is first and foremost an educational
internship. As the incarcerated technicians begin to see the importance of theeducation, training and work that they do, and as they realize how valued they
are, they find a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Keegan explains that he andother scientific support staff are not able to be at the prison to supervise thework every day, so they leave it in the hands of the incarcerated technicians
https://www.thurstontalk.com/2019/03/26/the-butterfly-effect-evergreen-grad-student-explains-theripples-of-species-recovery/

and DOC support staff. “They have to work independently and sometimes solve
complex problems, and they do it really well,” he says.
Since 2011, incarcerated technicians at Mission Creek have successfully raisedover 18,000 captive butterflies for release in their caterpillar form.
When the Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterflies arelarvae, also known as caterpillars, they are released
in prairie lands to aid in species recovery. Photo
credit: Dennis Buckingham

The Taylor’s Checkerspot Rearing
Program has been an example ofsuccessful collaboration. “It’s proven to
be a model for the Department of Fishand Wildlife, other conservation partners, and the DOC in working together tofind novel solutions to social and environmental problems,” says Keegan.

Opportunities for Masters in Environmental Studies
Students
As an MES student, Keegan works with SPP and has spent the last two and ahalf years pouring over the data collected in the captive rearing program.
Instead of building a study from the ground up and collecting data over a year
or so, Keegan is able to look at nearly a decade’s worth of data collected by theincarcerated technicians at Mission Creek along with data from the butterfly lab
at the Oregon Zoo. “This data is a goldmine of biological information that canhelp researchers understand more about the butterfly’s behavior and biology inthe field.” Keegan is the second MES Thesis on the butterfly program to comeout of SPP.
Keegan is specifically analyzing the reproductive capacity of female butterflies
that are captured and brought to the lab to lay their eggs. When Keegantranslates all this raw data, the information, which has mostly just beenhttps://www.thurstontalk.com/2019/03/26/the-butterfly-effect-evergreen-grad-student-explains-theripples-of-species-recovery/reported to the government as a part of data collection for the program, will
become a part of academic research. Keegan hopes that others will recognize
the contributions made by these individuals are very important. “Prisoners are
doing real scientific research and as a student, I can help analyze their data andpresent it in a way that validates what they are doing.”
Keegan Curry and Dennis Buckingham release butterfly
larvae at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Dennis is a former
Evergreen student and SPP staff member, now working
as a biologist at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Photo credit:
Mary Linders

Working with the SPP through the MES
program at Evergreen puts students at
the intersection of environmental andsocial issues, says Keegan, and it
presents grad students with real-world challenges in how to apply the principles
learned in the classroom, he adds.
At any given time, there are between 5 and 10 students collaborating with theSPP as they work towards their Master’s Degree at Evergreen. And it’s not justbutterflies. Across the state, in all 12 prisons, the SPP is involved withincarcerated individuals, helping them find encouragement and purpose.
Partnerships across organizations and agencies are being formed andstrengthened. Data is being collected. And the health of damaged ecosystems
continues to improve.
The Evergreen State College
2700 Evergreen Parkway NW, Olympia
360-867-6000

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