Lack of Monarchs seen locally, just as the species is classified as ‘endangered’
Carol Cooper is pictured here with a monarch that she helped raise from an egg laid on her milkweed plants in her front yard last year. Cooper regularly brings eggs in after they’re laid and provides a controlled environment where the insects have less predator pressure. She releases full grown Monarchs after they hatch.
Gainesville resident Carol Cooper says she’s been checking her blooming milkweed everyday, but the lack of Monarch larva on the plants is making for a disappointing summer.
“No Monarchs. No eggs yet,” she told the Times last week, adding that in past years she’d helped to raise the Monarchs who deposit eggs on her plants. “It’s several weeks late.”
Cooper’s own disappointment joins many other Monarch enthusiasts as the showy butterfly made its way into the “endangered” category by the International Union for Conservation Nature, the world’s most comprehensive scientific authority on the status of species.
The IUCN says the decrease in the migratory monarch butterfly, known for its spectacular annual journey of up to 4,000 kilometers across the Americas, has entered its red list of threatened species due to habitat destruction and climate change.
The endangered migratory monarch butterfly is a subspecies of the monarch butterfly. The native population, known for its migrations from Mexico and California in the winter to summer breeding grounds throughout the United States and Canada, has shrunk by between 22 and 72 percent over the past decade, the group explains.
“Legal and illegal logging and deforestation to make space for agriculture and urban development has already destroyed substantial areas of the butterflies’ winter shelter in Mexico and California, while pesticides and herbicides used in intensive agriculture across the range kill butterflies and milkweed, the host plant that the larvae of the monarch butterfly feed on,” IUCN stated in a press release about the designation.
The group says that the butterfly’s western population is at greatest risk of extinction, having declined by an estimated 99.9 percent from as many as 10 million to 1,914 butterflies between the 1980s and 2021.
The larger eastern population also shrunk by 84 percent from 1996 to 2014. Concern remains as to whether enough butterflies survive to maintain the populations and prevent extinction.
Find out more information by visiting the IUCN’s website at https://www.iucn.org/press-release/202207/migratory-monarch-butterfly-no....