[leps-talk] Why aren't Mexico's overwintering monarchs in the news yet this winter?

[Paul Cherubini]

Johnson, Kurt wrote:
> 
> I finally read the rest of this original post by Paul.  We HAVE made 
> the good news of the last months available to many many people 
> over our less publically visible grass-roots network and yes, its true, 
> the major news media like the "negative" (as in everything in the news)
> and therefore don't often pickup the positive...a fact of life and 
>"journalism". 

Kurt, todays NY Times article quotes Dr. Karen Oberhauser:

"A bad winter followed by a bad spring could be
 catastrophic," said Dr. Karen Oberhauser, a monarch
 ecologist at the University of Minnesota.

Likewise,  last summer the public was bombarded with more 
worrisome doomsayer predictions from the scientists:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SPRAY MAY IMPERIL MONARCH BUTTERFLY
By Julie Hauserman St. Petersburg Times, August 27, 2001

TALLAHASSEE--this year several U.S. butterfly researchers say the
massive monarch migration could face a threat here in the Florida
Panhandle where the state is aerial spraying an insecticide called
Dibrom to kill mosquitoes that can carry the West Nile virus.

"It could be devastating" said Karen Oberhauser an entomologist
 from the  University of Florida who has studied monarchs for 17 years.
"The migration is a key link in a chain. If something breaks that
chain -- like mosquito spray that's going to kill them -- there won't
be any monarchs to rebuild the population."

"Every bird watcher in Florida out to be screaming bloody murder"
said Chip Taylor, an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas who
runs a Website called the Monarch Watch. "They are knocking out
much of the insect population that the migrating birds feed on."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The public never gets to see graphs like this 
http://www.saber.net/~monarch/post.jpg that show that
despite the mosquito spraying in Florida this past summer, the Bt 
corn, the Roundup Ready soybeans, the urban sprawl, the global 
warming, etc. the monarch overwintering population in Mexico this
winter was 35% above normal and 3.34 times as large as 
last winter.

Thus, the public is gaining a distorted view that monarchs are in
decline. Are the reporters to blame?

Paul Cherubini

 
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