The eye-catching long-haul migrators are now listed as “vulnerable,” following a challenge to conservation status data
In an unusual reversal, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has decided North America’s monarch butterfly is not “endangered.” Instead, the insect is only “vulnerable” to extinction, the group said last week—adding that it could lower the alarm still further, changing the listing to “near threatened” if an upcoming census suggests the population is stable or growing.
Researchers generally agree that the number of monarchs wintering in Mexico declined beginning in the 1990s or earlier but stabilized around 2014 at about 55 million individuals. Many researchers blame the decline on two factors: logging in Mexico’s forests and farming in the U.S. and Canada that increasingly relied on crops modified to resist herbicides. That increased the use of herbicides that kill milkweed, which monarch caterpillars feed on.
Still, many scientists thought the “endangered” listing was warranted because drought along migration routes or cold winters could tip the population into an extinction spiral. “Monarch populations [are] at a level that most scientists suggest is not sustainable,” says Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was on the assessment team.by a team led by Wayne Thogmartin of the U.S. Geological Survey—is better.
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