It won some love in high places recently at a summit meeting of the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada. The plunging decline of the monarch has alerted all three nations. President Nieto of Mexico stated, “We have agreed to establish a working group to conserve the monarch butterfly as an emblematic symbol of North America which unites our three countries.”
The extraordinary 3,000-mile migration of the monarch butterflies each year from the grasslands of Canada and the United States to the volcanic mountain slopes of central Mexico where they completely cover fir trees has awed human beings for centuries. But the population of monarchs hibernating in Mexico from December to March has plummeted from a high of 1.1 billion in 1996 to a pitiful 33 million in 2013. Experts once thought the decrease was due to extreme climate conditions. Now they believe the butterfly is starving.
The relentless spraying of herbicides in North America is wiping out once-plentiful milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat. Small scale illegal logging also is destroying the fir forest canopy in Mexico where the butterflies winter.
More than 100 scientists, Nobel Prize winners and environmentalists are calling for the massive planting of milkweed along roadsides and toxin-free buffer zones in the three nations.
No comments:
Post a Comment