[Leps-l] New report about status of monarch butterflies in North America

[Paul Cherubini]

Roger Kuhlman wrote:

> It is my experience in Washtnenaw county (southeast Michigan) that
> Milkweeds have become far far scarcer since the farmers in the region
> have gone to GMO crops in their fields. The fields today are so much
> more neet, tidy and free of other plants than corn or soybeans. That
> was not true a few decades ago.

Milkweed still routinely grows in the hundreds of thousands of
miles worth of farm road ditches in the upper Midwest that border
the GMO crops.  On Google Earth I quickly found some milkweed
growing in a ditch in Washtnenaw county, Michigan where you live:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.imagegainer.com_images_PaulCherubini_moorevillejpg.jpg&d=AwIF-g&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=tVAKMFPe3UCcsMWUFXo0FeX0xe1JUAj77B74DAI3DKI&m=MBn10SGtIwIKff3F6rTFWHDvHbDYuWQTYccRgiBXVMk&s=kweaXrcRm7QF7OYFNvJHlXbIAuTnJOGksHQemicxMMw&e= 

So milkweed and monarchs remain common in the upper Midwest
despite the fact that the milkweed that used to grow within the
crop fields was killed off during the years of 2000-2007 when farmers
gradually adopted GMO crops.

Since roughly 3-6 billion milkweed plants still grow in the northern
and central portions of the USA and adjacent provinces of Canada
and support a population of roughly 100 million monarchs, the
eastern monarch migration is not hardly “critically imperiled”.

Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.