Monarch Butterfly Disappearance a New Canary in the Coal Mine Derrick Z. Jackson - The Boston Globe
go to original October 7, 2013

The Documentary - The Incredible Story of the Monarch Butterfly: Four Wings and a Prayer (DokiBatelier)

The monarch is the only North American butterfly known to migrate. Its journey and metamorphosis are among the most amazing in the world, as no individual butterfly makes the whole round trip. In the spring, butterflies depart from Mexico for Texas, where they breed and die. Successors begin fanning out over the United States east of the Rockies, repeating the reproductive cycle several times along the way. A late-summer monarch in New England may represent the third or fourth generation that year.

But today, an assault awaits the butterfly at almost every stop. Its only food, milkweed, has disappeared as Midwestern grasslands become food and biofuel farmland, and agricultural fields are essentially sterilized for corn and soybean crops that are genetically modified to resist pesticides. Suburban development and the increasingly extreme weather accompanying climate change, particularly heat and drought, are taking a further toll.

In Mexico, the government has taken major steps to curb large-scale logging of monarch habitat in pine and fir forests west of Mexico City. But a study released last month by monarch researchers and the World Wildlife Fund found that small-scale logging is still continuing at alarming rates.

“Climate change, pesticides, and habitat fragmentation and loss are a pretty devastating combo,” said Mass Audubon President Henry Tepper. “The question is what is the exact combination?”

Read the rest at The Boston Globe

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