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Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

beyondpesticides.org

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Re: Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

#3

Post by ourmandave »

Iowa plans to plant milkweed state wide to help the Monarch recover. All part of a national effort.

http://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Planting-a-billion-milkweed...

Almost sounds touchy-feeling, until you get to this part (of the link above)...

"... The Endangered Species Act has tremendous impact on private land ownership. And so we don't want to get at a point as a partner with DNR with our other partners out there, we don't want to get to the point where there is no choice but to do this then it becomes mandated under the endangered species act. We'd rather have voluntary participation."

tl;dr; If the DNR shows up, we'll finally have to do something about our water quality.

Re: Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

#4

Post by tlb »

As it happens, I just got back from seeing the Monarch grove in Mexico. It's an amazing sight. When the sun comes out from behind the clouds and they all warm up and take off within a couple minutes, the air is so full of them that they darken the sky. And the mountain (in Michoacan province, about 2 hours by car from Mexico City) is beautiful and the people are friendly. If you've seen the Monarch groves on the California coast, Mexico has 2 orders of magnitude more. Well worth the trip.

Our guides, showing WWF slides, told a more optimistic story about numbers. They had declined to very low levels around 2011, but have bounced back substantially. They said the small decline in the last 2 years might be normal variation due to weather. The graphs showed random variation in population by a factor of 2 from year-to-year going back to the 1970s, so it's probably hard to conclude anything from a single year's count.

Still, if you live along the migration corridor, please plant milkweed and don't use glyphosate weed killer.

Re: Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

#6

Post by Natsu »

ourmandave wrote: post #3

Iowa plans to plant milkweed state wide to help the Monarch recover. All part of a national effort. http://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Planting-a-billion-milkweed... Almost sounds touchy-feeling, until you get to this part (of the link above)... "... The Endangered Species Act has tremendous impact on private land ownership. And so we don't want to get at a point as a partner with DNR with our other partners out there,…

My mom used to raise Monarch caterpillars for her elementary school class. I remember that it was always difficult to find milkweed even back then. We had to walk a certain hiking trail to find some and then search the plants for a few caterpillars. I don't ever remember seeing large patches of milkweed, only a few scattered plants with perhaps a dozen or so plants over a roughly one mile hike.

Re: Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

#9

Post by School-Cotton »

opilionesman wrote: post #8

Has anyone ever bothered to ask themselves that the ridiculous propagation of the idiotic ritual killing of every terrestrial arthropod by suburbanites throughout every municipality east of the Mississippi might actually be a major contribution to this outcome?

I don't have a clue what you're talking about, but then again I'm from west of that river. Mind elaborating?

Re: Monarch butterfly numbers keep declining

#10

Post by girvo »

School-Cotton wrote: post #9
opilionesman wrote: post #8

Has anyone ever bothered to ask themselves that the ridiculous propagation of the idiotic ritual killing of every terrestrial arthropod by suburbanites throughout every municipality east of the Mississippi might actually be a major contribution to this outcome?

I don't have a clue what you're talking about, but then again I'm from west of that river. Mind elaborating?

We (as city folk) kill all of the insects we come across in our homes.
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