The monarch butterfly is in trouble. Farming and other human development have eradicated much of its habitat. Conservationists fear the Trump administration’s new order weakening the Endangered Species Act will make matters worse.
A monarch butterfly perches on milkweed at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., Friday, May 31, 2019. Farming and other human development have eradicated state-size swaths of its native milkweed habitat, cutting the butterfly's numbers by 90% over the last two decades. It is now under considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
Rapid development and climate change are escalating the rates of species loss, according to a May United Nations report. For monarchs, farming and other human development have eradicated state-size swaths of native milkweed habitat, cutting the butterfly’s numbers by 90% over the past two decades. Another coming change will end across-the-board protections for creatures newly listed as threatened. Conservation groups say that will leave them unprotected for months or years, as officials, conservationists and industries and landowners hash out each species’ survival plan, case by case.
Some animals — like a shy mountain caribou species that went extinct from the wild in the lower 48 states last winter, despite protection under the Endangered Species Act — struggle and disappear out of sight. Monarchs can serve as reminders of the others, says Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and a conservation biologist who has studied monarchs since 1984.
For corn and soybean farmer Wayne Fredericks in Osage, Iowa, the monarch’s seemingly vulnerable life cycle is a mystery.
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