Friday, February 13th, 2015

The monarch massacre: Nearly a billion butterflies have vanished

Author: Darryl Fears
Source: The Washington Post
Publication Date: February 9, 2015
Link: The monarch massacre: Nearly a billion butterflies have vanished

Stephan: When I left University I went to work for National Geographic Magazine and the first story I was assigned was the great migration of the Monarch butterflies. I knew nothing about it at the time and as I educated myself I came to realize the extraordinary annual pilgrimage of these seemingly fragile little beings was one of the great nature events of North America. For countless millennia the butterflies have flown, yet now this ancient pattern is breaking down, thanks to human activity. This report gives a pretty good sense of the state of things.

The migration of the Monarch butterflies is one of the great nature events, and it is now breaking down thanks to human activity.
Credit: Live Science

Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises and lions grab all the headlines, but what’s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, about 970 million have vanished.

It happened as farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies’ nursery, food source and home. In an attempt to counter two decades of destruction, the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a partnership with two private conservation groups, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, to basically grow milkweed like crazy in the hopes of saving the monarchs.

Monarch butterflies are a keystone species that once fluttered throughout the United States by […]

Read the Full Article