Anonymous ID: a2a546 July 21, 2022, 8:17 a.m. No.16774617   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>4644

>>16774083

>>16774362

2022 Monarch Butterfly Update

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen โ€“ 8 June 2022

This last March, I reported on these digital pages the marvelous and mysterious news that the census of the Western Monarch annual migration in California had shown an increase in overwintering monarchs by 100 times over the previous year. The expert consensus had been that the Western migration would be shown to be extinct.

But Nature does not always listen to the experts and just does what it does.

โ€œThe butterflies hit a devastating record low last year [2020-2021], numbering fewer than 2,000 across California.โ€ โ€ฆ. โ€œWe were pretty concerned last year that we were potentially facing a reality where there would no longer be monarch butterflies in the Western US,โ€ Sarina Jepsen, director of the endangered species program at the Xerces Societyโ€

That statement from Sarina Jepsen is probably a misquote โ€“ no one thinks that the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is going extinct in the Western U.S.. The fear is that the natural phenomena called the Western Monarch Migration will cease. โ€œโ€ฆin 1983, the IUCN took the unprecedented step of creating a new category in the Invertebrate Red Data Book, in order to list the monarch migration as a Threatened Phenomenon. This is because the numbers of American migrants are falling sharply.โ€

This last March I reported that due to the Covid pandemic (probably) the usual annual census of overwintering Monarchs in Mexico had either not been completed or had not been reported.

 

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/08/2022-monarch-butterfly-update/