Pesticides, diminishing habitat and climate change are taking their toll on monarch butterflies.
FILE - A butterfly sits on a leaf at Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, Calif., on Nov. 10, 2021.
The survey noted that a site owned by The Nature Conservancy in Santa Barbara that saw 33,200 monarchs last winter hosted only 198 butterflies this year.Monarchs across the continent face mounting threats, chief among them vanishing milkweed, the host plant for the insect’s caterpillars. The plant has been disappearing before a combination of drought, wildfires, agriculture and urban development, according to, a group that works to protect monarchs.
Monarchs suffer when the mercury gets up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and any temperatures above 108 are lethal to the insects, Pelton said. Western states saw a heat wave in July that drove temperatures in some areas well past 100 degrees. Palm Springs, for example, hit a record 124 on July 5. Another heat wave cooked northern California in early October, with multiple cities breaking heat records.
“This is bad news,” Pelton said of the 2024 population drop. “But we have seen incredible recovery. this doesn’t mean we’re not going to have western monarchs. It’s hopefully a wake-up call that a bad year can set them back pretty significantly.”that it was working to list monarchs as threatened, a move that would prohibit anyone from killing, transporting them or making changes that would render their property permanently unusable for the species, such as eradicating all milkweed from the land.
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