Brower replies- The most recent ranting about monarch butterfly conservation

Charles Bordelon legitintellexit at earthlink.net
Thu Oct 9 16:47:52 EDT 2003


Are we to assume Monarchs are too stupid to find other sites?  All this talk
and number-crunching is dung in the real world. What did house sparrows do
before there were houses?  Barn swallows before barns?  Ratings, ratings,
rantings...  So what?  You can't tell me such a successful insect couldn't
adapt.  We'll destroy ourselves before every resource is depleted.  Go to
the Mexican Government.  This whole Monarch business is not only moot, it's
completely boring.  cb
----- Original Message -----
From: <neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk>
To: <tils-leps-talk at yahoogroups.com>
Cc: <leps-l at lists.yale.edu>; <brower at sbc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 1:49 PM
Subject: Brower replies- The most recent ranting about monarch butterfly
conservation


> Professor Brower asked me to pass on this message to these lists.
>
> Neil Jones
>
> From: Lincoln P. Brower brower at sbc.edu
> Subject: The most recent ranting about monarch butterfly conservation
> by Mr. Cherubini.
>
>
> To whom it may concern:
>
> To those who may seriously consider taking Mr. Paul Cherubini's
> October 2003 criticisms of L. P. Brower's recent (4 October 2003)
> lecture to the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History in California,
> I suggest perusing the following three scientific papers:
>
> 1) Brower, L.P., Kust, D.R., Rendon-Salinas, E., Serrano, E.G.,
> Kust, K.R., Miller, J., Fernandez del Rey, C., &amp; Pape, K. (In
> press  2003). Catastrophic winter storm mortality of monarch
> butterflies in Mexico during January 2002. In: The Monarch Butterfly:
> Biology and Conservation (Editors. K.M. Oberhauser  M.
> Solensky). Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
>
> 2) Brower, L.P., Castilleja, G., Peralta, A., Lopez-Garcia, J.,
> Bojorquez-Tapia, L., Diaz, S., Melgarejo, D.,  Missrie, M.
> (2002). Quantitative changes in forest quality in a principal
> overwintering area of the monarch butterfly in Mexico: 1971 to
> 1999. Conservation Biology, 16, 346-359.
>
> 3) Bojorquez, L.A., Brower, L.P., Castilleja, G.,
> Sánchez-Colón, S., Hernández, M., Calvert, W.H., Díaz, S.,
> Gómez-Priego, P., Alcantar, G., Melgarejo, E.D., Solares, M.J.,
> Gutiérrez, L., Juárez, M.d.L. (2003). Mapping expert
> knowledge: redesigning the monarch butterfly biosphere reserve.
> Conservation Biology, 17, 367 - 379.
>
> The first paper (still in press) documents the winter storm mortality
> of overwintering monarch butterflies in Mexico that occurred in
> January 2002. One quarter of a billion monarchs were estimated
> to have been killed in two of several known colonies, all of which
> were impacted by a powerful and widespread storm and cold
> front. The second publication documents that the monarchs'
> overwintering forest within the 1986 presidentially decreed reserve
> has been degraded by 44% as well as heavily fragmented over a 28 year
> period, through January 1999. The third publication describes the
> process and rationale by which the new 2000 presidential decree
> increased the supposedly protected overwintering area from 62 to 217
> square miles. Research in progress with colleagues from the
> University of Mexico, NASA, Lynchburg College and Sweet Briar College
> indicates that extensive illegal logging is currently occurring
> within the supposedly protected areas. When these data are published,
> they will be available for public scrutiny.
>
> The exact number of years it will take for the current and increasing
> logging to irreversibly disrupt the migration of the monarch's
> eastern population is always an unknown. What we do know is
> that the forests within the tiny area of Mexico in which hundreds of
> millions of monarchs overwinter is being rapidly degraded.
> Denial of this is yet another example of the ostrich-like behavior of
> the more extreme members of the anti-conservation movement who choose
> to obfuscate hard scientific evidence in order to advance their
> political positions.
>
> Lincoln P. Brower
> Research Professor of Biology
> Sweet Briar College
>
>
>
>
>
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