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

The monarch butterfly refuge in Mexico, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is winter home to tens of millions of migrating monarchs, should be declared “in danger” because the remarkable transcontinental migration it was established to protect “is at risk of disappearing,” a group of Mexican, American and Canadian civil society and conservation organizations said in a petition today.

Many Americans were startled to learn recently that a butterfly once found in so many people’s backyards and fields is now being petitioned for federal listing as a threatened species. It will take months if not years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the monarchs require this form of protection.

Rather than advocating for a particular outcome, I wish to focus on how any effective protection will need to positively engage both farmers and the rest of the food supply chain.

This last year, tens of thousands of children across the Midwest watched IMAX film Flight of the Butterflies on the…

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…

Stephanie Spencer considers monarch butterflies a staple of classroom learning. As a first grade teacher, she brought monarchs into her classroom to illustrate required content on life cycles.

Years later she began teaching third grade, and monarchs became the focus of her unit on migration.

The Sweet Briar community was saddened to learn of the death of Lincoln Brower, a world-renowned entomologist and research professor at the College. Brower died peacefully at his home in Nelson County on Tuesday, July 17, 2018, after an extended illness.

Brower came to Sweet Briar in 1997 after retiring from the University of Florida as Distinguished Service Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, joining his wife and research collaborator,

Swaths of Midwestern wildflowers planted by well-meaning governments and nonprofits to attract bees may be inadvertently harming them. That’s the surprising finding of a new scientific study that concludes a bee-killing pesticide carried by wind or water from nearby farms is landing on the wildflowers, putting pollinators at risk.

Scientists spent two years examining wildflower plots planted around Brookings. Testing for the presence of clothianidin, a neonicotinoid insecticide commonly used in corn growing, they consistently found the insecticide on the wildflowers — even in those planted on organic farms where no pesticides are used.

5 Simple Tips for Saving Vanishing Species in Your Yard and Community   When I was a child my parents…

Monarch butterflies have made a big comeback in their wintering grounds in Mexico, after suffering serious declines, experts said Friday.

The area covered by the orange-and-black insects in the mountains west of Mexico City this season was more than three and a half times greater than last winter. The butterflies clump so densely in the pine and fir forests they are counted by the area they cover rather than by individual insects.

When Gary Nabhan was growing up in the Indiana Dunes, Indiana, he remembered being sleepy in the middle of his class one day. Looking out the window, he studied the leaves of a tree nearby.

Nabhan, who would later find out he is color blind, thought the leaves had odd colors. And as this crossed his mind, the leaves — which turned out to be monarch butterflies — flew away. Nabhan’s lifelong fascination with pollinators had just begun. Pollinator animal species such as bees, bats and monarch butterflies are essential to biodiversity.

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.

Eighteen months after the Tres Amigos (Mexican, U.S., and Canadian leaders) agreed to collaborate one monarch butterfly recovery, we can at least see this vision reaching across borders to take hold at the grass roots level. Thanks to technical and financial support from many agencies, universities and non-profits, August 2015 was the season for hands-on…

As 2014’s National Pollinator Week begins, it is time to think critically about what constitutes tangible actions and credible research on behalf of monarch conservation in the midst of a key moment in American conservation history. Many conservationists fear that green-washing and tokenism will distract the public from supporting the essential work…

Insect ecologist Chip Taylor is a friend to both the monarch butterfly and the honeybee. He’s been tracking monarchs and restoring their habitats since 1992.

And he’s worked with bees in French Guiana, Venezuela and Mexico.

Each year for Mother’s Day, flowers are the “gift of choice” for Moms since they represent such colorful beauty, fragrance and intricate designs.

Whether it is a vase of fresh cut flowers, an indoor arrangement or perennials for the outside garden, flowers help us express our heart-felt sentiment on Mother’s Day…