Pressure Builds On Monarchs As Mexico's Forests Fall - NYT

[hatrack]

CONTEPEC, Mexico, March 9 - "Homero Aridjis, a poet and naturalist, can remember years when monarch butterflies filled the streets here in his hometown like a living torrent of orange and black and stayed all winter on the fir-covered mountain rising above the village. Not this year. The colony of butterflies that arrived here in November was tiny and retreated up the mountain, as far away as possible from the lower slopes where loggers have thinned or destroyed the forest the butterflies depend on. "There used to be rivers of butterflies, but now there are years when there are no butterflies at all," Mr. Aridjis said as he climbed the mountain of his youth recently. "This is a village full of ghosts, not of people, but of nature, a paradise lost."

The tourists still come, but there is not as much for them to see. This is a small town of 10,000, like many in Mexico, dominated by a church and a school in rolling fields at the foot of Cerro Altamirano. The country people here still work on their small farms, but in recent decades the town's adobe houses have been replaced by uglier cinderblock buildings, and rusting automobiles outnumber burros and horses. Not only are there comparatively few monarchs in Contepec, but the numbers that came to weather the winter at five other forest sanctuaries in central Mexico also dropped sharply this year.

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Biologists and nature lovers say bad weather is not the whole story. They warn that logging in Mexico and herbicides in the United States have endangered these almost miraculously migratory insects, which flutter thousands of miles. Hardier genetically altered corn and soybean crops in the United States and Canada, in the breadbasket areas that are the monarch's main summer conjugal grounds, have enabled farmers to use stronger herbicides to eliminate weeds. That has drastically depleted the supply of flowers on which the butterflies feed, as well as common milkweed, on which the monarch lays its eggs in the spring and summer and on which its larvae feed, several biologists say.

The drop in butterfly counts is staggering. In 2004, at a monitoring site in Cape May, N.J., for instance, scientists registered the lowest number of butterflies heading to Mexico since the program began in 1991, according to scientists in the field. Similar results were found in Virginia. Scientists from the University of Minnesota who have been counting larvae in the Midwest since 1997 recorded their lowest numbers. Some environmentalists say that preventing permanent devastation of the monarch population might require concerted action by Mexico, the United States and Canada, though these countries have not put the issue on their foreign affairs agendas."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/international/americas/14mexico.html?hp

[brokensymmetry]

1. Terribly sad.

A world without the Monarchs will be a sadder, grayer world. I suspect I'll live to see it. :(