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

[Dennis Schlicht]

From: dws1108 at msn.com
To: leps-l at lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: [Leps-l] New report about status of monarch butterflies in North America
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 23:02:04 -0500





 Yes there are still milkweeds.
The Monarchs that do emerge are very soon subjected to aerial spraying with insecticides and fungicides over most every acre of the corn belt. Add to that the poison pollen and plants from the systemic neonics and what we have is a collapse of many species in the corn belt . 
 
Most all of the prairie obligates  (H. dacotae, H. ottoe,  O.poweshiek, A. arogos, C. inornata, L. helloides and G. lygdamus) are now not to be found in most of Iowa and Minnesota. 
All in a poisoned landscape. If not that , then what?
 
Dennis Schlicht
 
> From: monarch at saber.net
> Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 19:56:00 -0700
> To: leps-l at mailman.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: [Leps-l] New report about status of monarch butterflies in	North America
> 
> 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.
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