Why You Should Worry About The Butterflies

As Mexico emerges from the most violent election campaign within living memory and embarks on the presidency of Andres López Obrador, one prominent citizen watches at a diagonal: a veteran of Mexico’s other war – not that over narco-traffic and its clients in politics, but that against nature.

In a recent interview with the daily El Universal, Homero Aridjis – award-winning poet and former ambassador – described all the candidates at last June’s election as “environmental illiterates” – referring to the battle he has fought for decades now, and which he sees reaching its final stages – for Mexico’s natural and cultural heritage.

I would like to expand upon Dennis Keeney’s fine column of Sept. 21 on the plight of the monarch butterfly.

I have worked on these butterflies for 15 years, and Mr. Keeney cites my research in his article. He notes that the population crashed in 2012 and 2013 because of bad weather, but by that time, the population had already declined by 65 percent since 1999.

Our data show that this decline was primarily due to the loss of milkweeds in the Midwest, the primary breeding area for monarchs.

El Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en el Senado propuso que en el marco de la Cumbre de Líderes de América del Norte, mañana miércoles, en la Ciudad de Toluca, se tomen decisiones conjuntas para poner en marcha un Programa de Conectividad Ecológica de la Región para la conservación de la Mariposa Monarca.

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.

A line of people curves like the body of a giant caterpillar, twisting up the mountain into the endangered oyamel fir forest. Michoacán, Mexico—the cloud-misted overwintering site of the monarch butterfly.

Near the middle of the caterpillar of people, I kept pace, thinking about Catholic peregrinos who journey on well-worn footpaths and roads, sometimes hundreds of miles, to reach a precious relic…

Want to help monarch butterflies? Encourage a local school, faith group, business or institution with gardens or green space to add more milkweed and butterfly-friendly plants.

Here are the seven steps to planting the seeds for growing a butterfly garden in your community…

Gary Nabhan and I are bumping along in a rental car down a two-track dirt road that follows the edge of Sonoita Creek’s floodplain, some 29 kilometers north of the Arizona–Mexico border.

Nabhan—an ethnobiologist, conservation biologist and agroecologist at the University of Arizona and author of more than 30 books on food, farming and nature—tells me how extraordinary this borderlands region is for pollinators: native bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, even nectar-feeding bats. And now he is giving me a tour to illustrate his point.

On your way to being seated at Oyamel in Washington D.C., you pass stunning mobiles of orange and black monarchs, the now-imperiled butterfly that winters in the sacred oyamel fir forests of Central Mexico.

But once you look at the menu, you read that Chef Jose Andrés is donating one dollar for each Taco de Puerco Estilo Apatzingan to the preservation of monarch…

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.

Monarch butterflies have experienced a breathtaking decline in the past 20 years, going from a billion strong in 1996 to roughly 30 million today because of habitat destruction. On Monday, the U.S. government announced the first federal pot of money for rescuing monarchs, with the Fish and Wildlife Service earmarking $3.2 million for the effort.

About $2 million will go toward conservation programs…

    Adriana Briscoe, a professor of biology and ecology at UC Irvine, studies vision in butterflies. Turns out, butterflies…

In a landmark meeting in the history of insect conservation, the White House today convened diverse stakeholders to address catastrophic declines in pollinators and prioritize their recovery on a continent-wide scale. Led by White House Science Policy Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, more than fifty farmers, beekeepers, nurserymen, scientists, educators…

For more than a decade, Margaret McRae has raised monarch butterflies in her east-end Toronto home. Every two years she applies for permission from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, then scans the milkweed that grows plentifully in her gardens.

When she finds a leaf bearing an egg, she brings it inside to protect it from parasites. Within four days, she has a monarch caterpillar, covered in white, black, and yellow stripes.

Monarch butterflies are in trouble. These popular insects, which have captured the public imagination with their several-thousand mile migrations, have been steadily disappearing for the past 20 years. Now, Monsanto says it wants to help turn the tide.

Can the seed and pesticide giant seen by many as responsible for the monarchs’ decline make a difference for these pollinators? Or will its next batch of genetically engineered (GE) crops make matters worse?

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.