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

[Paul Cherubini]

On Feb 16, 2013, at 11:21 AM, Chuck Vaughn wrote:

> I also reject anyone who dreams up catastrophic scenarios to
> advance their cause, whether it be pure motives or the profit
> motive (Al Gore comes to mind here), makes dire predictions
> that scare people, and then the predictions never come to
> pass and they're never held accountable. 

Chuck, a pattern of chronically inacurrate scientific judgements 
and a lack of accountability for those multiple and continuing 
mistakes are issues that concern me too in regard to the past 
24 years (and counting) worth of monarch migration extinction 
predictions by high profile monarch scientists. Historically 
they have even thought it was scientifically plausible 
that just a few individual monarch citizen scientists like myself 
could inadvertently cause the collapse of the eastern monarch 
migration phenomenon.

Brief example: In Sept. 1996 fourteen, mostly PhD scientists 
including Dr's Lincoln Brower, Karen Oberhauser and Chip 
Taylor wrote this piece in BioScience magazine:
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6742/keiper.jpg

In the article they expressed very serious concern that a few 
citizen scientists (such as myself) who were shipping low 1000's 
of wild caught western monarchs to the eastern USA for
release for monarch navigation study purposes might 
inadvertently release a novel strain of a parasite that could 
cause "recurrent epidemics in eastern monarchs that could 
lower overwintering population sizes to the point at which 
interactions with known or unknown ecological factors might 
be devastating."  And they went on to say: Recall that the 
passenger pigeon used to darken North American skies 
and although hunting drastically lowered its numbers its 
final demise was due toa population crash of unknown cause."

Then at the end of the paper they wrote "if [Paul Cherubini's
et al] transfers continue and our concerns are correct, at the
worst the whole migration-overwintering phenomenon of 
the monarch butterfly would be at risk."

So we see in 1996 a broad consensus of monarch scientists 
actually thought it was scientifically plausible that just a few 
individuals like myself could inadvertently cause the collapse 
of the whole eastern migration-overwintering phenomenon - a
phenomenon that involves hundreds of millions of butterflies 
spread out across two and a half million miles of land.

Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.