[Leps-l] [leps-talk] Monarch Armageddon

[Paul Cherubini]

On Feb 14, 2013, at 8:08 PM, Roger Kuhlman wrote:

> Remember the Passenger Pigeon.  Once there were
> billions of them.

And remember in 1991 Dr's Lincoln Brower and Steven 
Malcolm wrote this about the monarch in a peer 
reviewed scientific journal*:  "its eastern North American 
migratory phenomenon is now threatened with extinction 
and will probably be destroyed within 10-20 years."
http://saber.net/monarch/extinction2.jpg

Unlike passenger pigeons, monarchs are not stressed
by a shortage of food, disease and are not being mass 
hunted and shot.

And despite the widespread adoption of Roundup Ready 
corn and soybean plants by Midwestern farmers and the 
resulting reduction in the abundance of milkweed on farmland,
there are still billions of milkweed plants growing along the
edges of those same farm fields and will be for the forseeable 
future. So to this day monarchs can still be routinely seen 
laying eggs on those crop margin and farm roadside milkweed 
plants like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MqrvAxTl0I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKmDId55pfc

And to this day migratory monarchs continue to be 
spectacularly abundant in the late summer in midwestern 
farm towns that are surrounded by the Roundup Ready 
crops.  Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4e3S2sm13g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJCnU7PB9to

So one wonders: Does professor Chip Taylor have a 
legitimate scientific basis for telling the public and
reporters that just because there is less, but still alot,
of milkweed growing on midwestern farmland, the 
monarch migration could be on the brink of collapse
as he says or implies in these videos?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZXGRZMrsDU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Y9CKP1DuQ

Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.

*Brower, L. and S. B. Malcolm. 1991. "Animal migrations: 
Endangered phenomena." Amer. Zool. 31: 265-267.