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

[Foley, Patrick]

Paul,

As we have discussed at great length on other listservs, parasites have apparently caused range collapse in several Bombus species in North America, including Bombus occidentalis.

The present understanding is that these parasites were transferred from bee breeding facilities in Europe.

As I have also pointed out to you, population biology, especially epidemiology, does not have linear dynamics. Small perturbations can have enormous effects.

PhD ecologists are often wrong, in fact sure to be wrong since the world does not fit our ideas perfectly. But they are not just conspiring to create alarm. 

Patrick Foley
bees, fleas, flowers, disease
patfoley at csus.edu
________________________________________
From: leps-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [leps-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] on behalf of Paul Cherubini [monarch at saber.net]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 11:03 PM
To: Leps List
Subject: Re: [Leps-l] [leps-talk] Monarch Armageddon

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.
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