For the past 20 years, the population of monarch butterflies has been dropping. In the past few years, it has been dropping catastrophically. In 1996, there were an estimated 1 billion monarchs in North America; today there are only about 35 million.
The multigenerational, 3,000-mile-long migration of monarchs from Canada to Mexico and back to the Gulf States in the spring has long been a subject of fascination and devotion for researchers and ordinary people alike. The spectacle of thousands or even millions of monarchs flying overhead and resting in treetops has been a wondrous thing to behold in places from Northern California to Cape May, New Jersey.
The huge decline in the orange butterflies has been blamed on a combination of factors including illegal logging in Mexico, droughts, wildfires, and most importantly, the drastic loss of crucial milkweed habitat in the US. Milkweed is the only food plant that monarch caterpillars can eat and modern herbicides like those used on genetically modified crops are wiping it out over large areas.
The good news is that the governments of the US, Mexico and Canada are all taking the problem seriously. There is a federal task force working on developing strategies to help the monarch. Companies like Monsanto describe milkweed as a weed that competes with crops in the field, but even they are taking part in a coalition trying to tackle the problem.
Ordinary citizens are pitching in too, volunteering in butterfly observation and tagging efforts and even planting milkweed in their own gardens. The beautiful monarch is worth saving.
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As Dwindling Monarch Butterflies Make Their Migration, Feds Try to Save Them
Photo, posted November 15, 2008, courtesy of DocentJoyce via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.