Why You Should Worry About The Butterflies

Everybody loves monarch butterflies. Author Anurag Agrawal refers to them as “the Bambi of the insect world.”

They are specifically bred to be released at weddings; their image has been pressed into service as the symbol of environmental organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Non-GMO project.

Two years ago migrating monarch butterflies transformed the lush gardens of Cape May Point into a series of “giant orange snowglobes.” That’s how Mark Garland of the Monarch Monitoring Project describes the good monarch days, the kind of days when thousands fly overhead.

There’s been no such spectacle yet this year, but Garland and members of the project’s team, who take a census of the monarchs three times a day, are holding out hope. The popular orange-and-black insects will be drifting toward this peninsula for a few more weeks to fill up on nectar before riding the winds that will hoist them over the Delaware Bay and on toward Mexico.

Monarch butterflies are known for their striking flame-orange and black appearance, and especially for their mass migration in their millions to spend winters in the mountain forests of Mexico. But despite growing problems with deforestation in Mexico, their struggle begins at home in the United States and Canada.

The butterflies that fly to Mexico are the great-great-great grandchildren of the monarchs that were in Mexico the previous winter. In 2013 the overwintering population in Mexico covered 0.67 hectares of fir forest (about 44 million butterflies) the lowest since counts began in 1994.

As we dream of our summer gardens, it’s time to consider adding some milkweeds. Milkweed flowers look like something from another planet: Sputnik-like bundles of little blossoms with curved prongs in pink, orange, purple and white.

At least five milkweed species connect Flagstaff to the annual migration of monarch butterflies up and down North America. In fact the Southwest Monarch Study pinpoints Flagstaff as a “monarch hotspot.”

The annual migration of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) has high cultural value and recent surveys indicate monarch populations are declining. Protecting migratory species is complex because they cross international borders and depend on multiple regions.

Understanding how much, and where, humans place value on migratory species can facilitate market-based conservation approaches.

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.

Since the onset of spring, one kind of game-changing news after another has reached Iowa farmers. These announcements will affect the third of the state’s farmers who are struggling to control superweeds by using glyphosates and other herbicides.

New research revelations, government policy changes and farmers’ own dissatisfactions could radically alter both weed and pollinator management in the Midwest.

“This changes everything”–the line that Donald Trump stole from Naomi Klein (who referred to climate change, not emails) can only be authentically used in relation to one amazing news story this week: The front page Sunday NY Times article by Danny Hakim “Doubts About a Promised Bounty: Genetically Modified Crops Have Failed to Lift Yields and Ease Pesticide Use.”

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.

The David Suzuki Foundation is calling on governments and rail, road and hydro agencies across Canada to join the growing ranks of milkweed lovers who are rallying to support monarch butterfly conservation.

Over the past month, U.S. federal and state agencies have made encouraging announcements, including a commitment of US$3.2 million for programs to grow milkweed — the plant monarchs depend on — in schoolyards and gardens and on highway roadsides from Mexico to Minnesota.

  One of the joys of the season is the stunning sight of a monarch butterfly. One Long Island woman…

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.

Monarch butterflies are — quite literally — a force of nature. They strike out each year by the thousands on a four-generation, 3,000-mile-long journey of pure instinct and faith.

They use both inherent and imprinted knowledge. They use subterfuge, placing their eggs on a plant that feeds their young caterpillars, but makes them poisonous and distasteful to predators. They use natural GPS.

A new census found this winter’s population of North American monarch butterflies in Mexico was at the lowest level ever…

The migration of monarch butterflies is one of the natural world’s most epic journeys. Weighing only about as much as a paper clip, they fly up to 3,000 miles from their summer homes in America’s backyards and grasslands to wintering grounds in Mexico’s mountain forests.

But in recent years, the monarch butterfly populations have dwindled alarmingly.