Mexican Monarchs

Chip Taylor chip at ku.edu
Sat Mar 10 21:04:16 EST 2001


To: dplex-l at raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Chip Taylor <chip at ku.edu>
Subject: Mexico --- Shocking news
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

The following is more news from Mexico concerning the possibility 
that large numbers of monarchs were killed by loggers.As you may 
recall, there were two reports last Thursday that followed in quick 
succession. The first story implicated loggers and the second seemed 
to indicate that a late winter storm might have been responsible for 
the massive kill reported at overwintering colonies. As I pointed out 
at the time, there was some inconsistency in the locations. The 
report the following day from lincoln Brower and his colleagues at 
World Wildlife Foundation Mexico seemed to weigh on the side of 
natural causes.

The following report is more specific and indicates that the reported 
pesticide deaths occurred several weeks before the storm of last 
weekend. Warning - this is a difficult story to comprehend and 
accept.There will certainly be a follow-up and hopefully more than 
one group of samples will be submitted for analysis of pesticide 
residues.

From Lincoln Brower

Dear Colleagues,

Independent lines of evidence are suggesting that more than one of the
overwintering colonies of the monarch butterfly in Mexico have been sprayed
by insecticides.  Please see the below carefully worded report from the
Group of 100 in Mexico City, received today by Lincoln Brower (10 March
2001) and the following, apparently completely independent statements.
David Marriott (Dir. of the Monarch Program, San Diego) called me last
night (9 March 2001) from Valle de Bravo and left a message that he had
been told yesterday by ejidatarios that the Cerro Pelon Sanctuary had also
been sprayed in late December 2000 and that the spray had killed 75% of the
colony. He is due back Monday night, and I will try and get the facts more
clearly as soon as I can. I also managed to contact Dr. William Calvert in
the Hotel Cortez last night (9 March 2001) in Mexico City and asked him to
obtain samples of the dead butterflies, freeze them and bring them back for
analysis. WWF-Mexico is trying independently to do the same thing.  Today
(10 March) I heard from yet another independent source (that I can not
divulge) that ejidatarios in another municipality also alluded to spraying.
It is important to realize that Cerro Pelon was protected in both the 1986
and 2000 Presidential Decrees, whereas San Andreas was not.   Cerro San
Andreas is about 60 miles northwest of Cerro Pelon, and therefore, if these
lines of uncertainty all prove to be true, then there must be a conspiracy
to destroy the butterflies.  I also called Betty and Homero Aridjis in
Mexico City at 10:40PM last night and as we were talking, Televisa National
News was broadcasting a segment called "Cemetery of the Butterflies" in
which they showed the national police (Profepa) walking through the San
Andreas colony amongst many dead monarchs and showing, in particular,
devastating logging in and adjacent to the colony.  The narrator, Joaquin
Lopez Doriega (sp. ?)stated that there was uncertainty whether the dead
butterflies had been killed by storms or by insecticides, reflecting the
content of the message I sent to you all yesterday.  Whether or not
spraying occurred, we have a very serious problem on our hands. I will keep
you posted as further information materializes.


The below is forwarded to you herewith. It is a translation of what Homero
Aridjis of the Group of 100 sent to the Mexican Press in the last 24 hours.

Lincoln Brower.


>X-Sender: grupo100 at laneta.apc.org
>Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 11:46:48 -0600
>To: brower at sbc.edu
>From: GRUPO DE LOS CIEN INTERNACIONAL <grupo100 at laneta.apc.org>
>Subject: Monarch butterfly massacre in Cerro San Andres
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>
>
>MONARCH BUTTERFLY MASSACRE
>
>		(report by Homero Aridjis, President, Grupo de los Cien)
>
>				March 10, 2001
>
>Evidence is piling up that an intentional application of pesticides caused
>the death of millions of monarch butterflies in the Cerro San Andres
>sanctuary in Michoacan state recently.
>
>The Cerro San Andres sanctuary, located in the triangle between three
>municipalities of Maravatio, Ciudad Hidalgo and Zinapecuaro, is one of 13
>sanctuaries where the monarch butterflies hibernate in Mexico from November
>to March each year after a long flight from Canada. Five of the sanctuaries
>were  officially protected by the government since 1986, but San Andres was
>one of eight sanctuaries that was not.
>
>Loggers have been cutting heavily in the San Andres area, trying to get out
>as much wood as they can before the sanctuary becomes an officially
>protected area.
>
>We believe that loggers sprayed pesticides, possibly DDT, on the trunks and
>branches of oyamel trees, killing all of the Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) in
>the colony. The witnesses who first discovered the mass deaths noticed that
>the wings of the butterflies they saw on the forest floor had an unusual
>brilliance, and they smelled petroleum or pesticide in the air.
>
>What was a sanctuary a short time ago is now a cemetery of dead butterflies
>and tree trunks. Loggers have been carrying away bags and bags of dead
>butterflies and now very few remain as evidence that there were millions of
>them in the forest. In each hectare (2.24 acres) of forest up to 10 million
>monarchs can gather.
>
>The Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) environmental group contacted Jose
>Jaime Hinojosa Campa, the mayor of Maravatio, from the leftist Party of the
>Democratic Revolution (PRD), who told us that during the yearly Monarch
>Butterfly Festival (February-March) the director of the town's House of
>Culture went to the San Andres sanctuary to locate the monarch colony but
>came back reporting huge quantities of dead butterflies.
>
>One witness, who cannot be identified because loggers have threatened him,
>said he saw the trees full of butterflies days before the massacre, but on
>February 5 he heard that "something was going on in the butterfly
>sanctuary, and that a huge number of the insects were dead." Police were
>ordered to investigate and they reported a smell of illegal pesticide DDT
>but found no container.
>
>In a February 6, 2001 report to Mayor Hinojosa, eyewitnesses said that "in
>effect the scene is catastrophic. You can observe that the ground is
>carpeted with dead butterflies." Witnesses said the dead butterflies piled
>up as deep as 20 centimeters.
>
>The same report cited peasants in the area who said they had never seen
>anything like this in all their years living in the area, and they suspect
>that there was some kind of intentional poisoning.
>
>The inspectors asked for SEMARNAT (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos
>Naturales, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources) to do a
>thorough investigation of the case, and to also investigate the wholesale
>logging in the region. They attached
>photographs of cut trees and samples of dead butterflies to be analyzed to
>determine why they died.
>
>"I think someone did something bad to the butterflies. To begin with it was
>not cold. There was a light rain that night, but that wouldn't harm them. I
>cried in the sanctuary. All the butterflies were dead. Every hole in the
>ground was full of butterflies, between rocks, in the dust. Some were lying
>dead on recently-cut trees that still had fresh branches. Five million
>butterflies. I felt horrible," said the witness who cannot be named.
>"People in the area say they used to fumigate the butterflies, because they
>thought they were a plague."
>
>The same witness said that the loggers are a strong, armed group, and have
>even kidnaped an employee of SEMARNAT. "Last year five trucks carrying
>illegal logs were stopped in Maravatio and 30-40 armed men came to get the
>drivers out of jail. These groups are protected. They are people with
>connections to Michoacan´s Governor Victor Tinoco Rubi (of the
>Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)) and PRI Deputies David Molina and
>Sabino Padilla. The loggers cut at night, from 2-6
>in the morning. They disappear in the day time. They do everything in the
>wee hours. They have special trucks to operate at night. 60,000 feet of
>wood a day pass through Maravatio alone."
>
>According to the PROFEPA office in Michoacan,(Procuraduria Federal del
>Medio Ambiente -- Attorney General's Office for the Environment)  local
>biologist Xiomara Mora claims that "the butterflies froze to death, due to
>climate conditions registered in December (rains, continuous low
>temperatures). Other circumstances that contributed to the butterfly death
>in San Andres are: The forest where the colony is situated is of very young
>trees with very unstable climate conditions. Nearby is an area that
>suffered a severe fire in 1998."
>
>But the eyewitness says "That report makes no sense to me. It says the
>butterflies died of cold, but it wasn't even cold. It also says that they
>died because there were no trees, but there are still a lot of trees. The
>forest burned, but that was three years ago."
>
>The Cerro San Andres sanctuary is at 3420 meters above sea level. According
>to the Monarch Butterfly Reserve Monitoring Program, some 10 million
>butterflies can be found in one hectare.
>
>In 1998 the Group of 100 complained that loggers in the San Andres area
>were cutting down huge amounts of trees and were also driving over
>butterflies on the ground.
>
>Year after year the Group of 100 has lodged complaints about out-of-control
>logging in the monarch butterfly reserve, and that logging companies in the
>region have grown bigger and more numerous. Armed groups have taken over
>parts of the five butterfly sanctuaries that were decreed protected areas
>in 1986. The other eight sanctuaries are being mowed down by loggers, as is
>the case in Cerro Pelon, where there are also suspicions of pesticide
>spraying causing massive butterfly deaths.
>Systematic logging has destroyed the forest's microclimate exposing the
>butterflies to the cold when there are sudden drops in the temperature.
>
>In November 2000, then President Ernesto Zedillo announced plans to expand
>the protected butterfly areas from the 16,100 hectares (39,767 acres)
>decreed in 1986 to more than 56,259 hectares (138,960 acres).
>
>The Grupo de los Cien calls on the government's environmental authorities
>to immediately investigate the recent events in Cerro San Andres and other
>butterfly sanctuaries, and to arrest and punish the loggers to the full
>extent of the law. Unfortunately, the heavily armed loggers operate under
>the protection of  local, state and federal authorities, and even if they
>were prosecuted the maximum punishment they would face is a laughable fine
>of 20 times the minimum wage.
>
>Corruption in the justice system has prevented action against the loggers
>thus far. Police and inspectors involved in night patrols in the area tip
>off loggers so that they will not be discovered. And when loggers have been
>arrested they are immediately set free by rotten elements in the
>prosecutor's office.
>
>The Monarchs arrived in early November -- as they do every year -- to
>hibernate in the central Mexican mountains. Normally they begin in late
>March their long migration through Mexico and the U.S., to Canada.  The
>massacre of an entire colony of butterflies, using pesticides, is
>unprecedented in Mexico and will surely have a serious impact on the
>reproduction and migration of the butterflies in years to come.
>
>
>Grupo de los Cien Internacional
>fax (52) 5520-3577
>
>
>
>
>*****************************************
>* Grupo de los Cien Internacional, A.C. *
>   Apartado Postal 41-523
>   Col. Virreyes
>* Mexico D.F. 11001, Mexico            *
>* Fax (525)520-3577  *
>*****************************************
>

Professor Lincoln P. Brower
Research Professor of Biology
Sweet Briar College
Sweet Briar, VA 24595
(Distinguished Service Professor of Zoology Emeritus, University of Florida)
Telephone:
Office: 804-277-5065 or 5655
Fax:      Call ahead and arrange
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