Scientists play crucial role in saving America’s most iconic butterfly

Habitat loss and the destruction of native plants have been responsible for the rapid decline of the monarch butterfly, the most recognized butterfly in North America. To help protect these majestic insects as they migrate, citizens in the U.S. are resorting to a simple yet powerful tool: gardening.

Gardens full of milkweed and nectar plants can serve both as rest stops for adult monarchs and as nurseries for their eggs.

Nearly every autumn, I head to the hills to band and release hawks, eagles and other powerful raptors as they ride the mountains’ updraft on their southern migration. While there, I always used to marvel at another autumnal migrant, tiny but no less magnificent — monarch butterflies, flapping earnestly on their delicate wings, dappling the ridge top orange and black.

Although they weigh less than a tenth-of-an-ounce, the monarchs’ 2,500-mile annual transcontinental journey to Mexico is longer than that of most raptors. They fly north from Mexico across the Midwest and up the eastern seaboard, to Canada — and back again, all in one summer. The yearly trek requires several generations.

One of the hottest winters in history poses good news and bad news for migrating Monarch butterflies this season. The good news: warm weather and well-timed rains translate into a grand wildflower season with plenty of milkweed in South Texas.

The bad news: those same high temperatures in Mexico where the Monarchs overwinter mean that many butterflies have burned up much of their stored winter fats, creating a lack of fuel and extra stress for their journey north.

The steep declines over the last quarter century of wild pollinators in the Southwest among native bees, monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus L.), hummingbirds, and nectar-feeding bats have come during a time of accelerated climate change, and are likely due to a variety of stresses interacting with climatic shifts.

Early June is the time of year we should begin seeing the monarch butterfly fluttering about our flowers and plants in central and western New York. But, scientists are worried that a sharp decline in the population of the iconic insect could cut back local monarch sightings dramatically, or end them all together.

When you think about it, the migration of the monarch butterfly is pretty amazing.

Make Way for Monarchs’ endorsement of the Moral Action on Climate Rally in September began with an idea to promote monarch conservation and to share locally native milkweed seed with the larger community to & raise the level of awareness on habitat of pollinators.

We initially hoped parents attending the Moral Action on Climate Rally on 9/24 on the National Mall would allow their young kids to dress up as little “pollinators” – honeybees, butterflies, dragonflies and bats…

Bounding out of a silver Ford pickup into the single-digit wind-flogged flatness that is Iowa in December, Laura Jackson strode…

Walking around my family’s property in upstate New York last summer, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in years: scores of monarch butterflies flying around the milkweed that rings the perimeter of the yard.

Six months later, at the end of January, biologists attending the Trinational Monarch Science Meeting, in Mexico City, confirmed what I and many others had been seeing throughout the summer and fall: the eastern monarch population was a hundred and forty-four per cent larger than it had been a year earlier. The announcement offered a modicum of hope amid dire warnings of mass extinctions and ecological catastrophe.

U.S. regulators will put new restrictions on the world’s most widely used herbicide to help address the rapid expansion of weeds resistant to the chemical, Reuters has learned.

The Environmental Protection Agency confirmed it will require a weed resistance management plan for glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s immensely popular Roundup weed-killer.

Chip Taylor is the founder and director of Monarch Watch.

He talks about the recent decline of the monarch butterfly due mainly to habitat loss, pesticide use and government policies that encourage ethanol production, and how there will need to be a massive effort to plant milkweed if we hope to save this iconic species.

We know monarch numbers have declined drastically in recent years. Estimates are down by 80 to 90% from a population size of about one billion in the early 1990s.

It’s long been thought that the big reason behind this is the loss of milkweed throughout the farming regions of the U.S. Midwest.

Among the countless organisms that have evolved during the history of life on earth, monarch butterflies are among the most extraordinary.

Sadly, their unique multigenerational migration across our large continent, their spectacular overwintering aggregations on the volcanic mountains in central Mexico, and their educational value to children in Canada, the United States, and Mexico are all threatened. Monitoring of the butterfly population over the past two decades indicates a grim situation.

The humble bee — nuisance, threat, and linchpin of the American food supply — has won over the leader of the free world. And now President Obama is intervening on the bee’s behalf as its habitat dwindles.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration will announce the first National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, a bureaucratic title for a plan to save the bee, other small winged animals and their breeding grounds.

Today, a coalition of more than 125 conservation, beekeeping, food safety, religious and farming advocacy groups rallied in front of the White House and delivered more than four million petition signatures calling on the Obama administration to put forth strong protections for bees and other pollinators.

The rally coincided with both a D.C. metro ad campaign, and Representatives Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and John Conyers’ (D-MI) reintroduction of the Saving America’s Pollinators Act…

Forty years ago, amid a forest swirling with millions of monarchs, an aging scientist found a thumbnail-sized sticker placed by two Minnesota schoolboys and solved a decades-old mystery.

Dr. Fred Urquhart, a Canadian zoologist, had searched for the wintering grounds of the monarch since 1937. At the time, no one knew where the monarchs came from each spring. In pursuit of an answer, Urquhart and his wife, Norah, created thousands of monarch tags — tiny stickers that adhered to wings — and distributed them to butterfly enthusiasts throughout North America.