Monarchs in Exile: Final Flight for a Billion Butterflies

by Scot French

In a world that desperately needs more beauty and grace, monarch butterflies are disappearing.

Like the honeybee, the species is struggling to exist in a new world order of pesticides and the fields of genetically modified crops that fuel their use.

In recent years, in the mountains of central Mexico where the monarchs have wintered for as long as anyone can remember, they have telegraphed their peril by not showing up. Nature’s kaleidoscopic parade of migrating monarchs has become a cortège, a time of mourning for the planet’s ecological future.

Observers had been alarmed by the record low number of monarch butterflies alighting from the skies. Fewer and fewer are arriving for hibernation in a place they know only by ancestral memory. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that since 1990, about 970 million monarchs have vanished.

“Monarch butterflies are a keystone species that once fluttered throughout the United States by the billions,” writes Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears. “They alighted from Mexico to Canada each spring on a trek that required six generations of the insect to complete. Afterward, young monarchs, about the quarter of the weight of a dime, that know nothing about the flight pattern through the United States, not to mention Mexico, fly back, resting, birthing and dining on milkweed. Only about 30 million remain.”

Farmers clearing land are a significant factor in the dramatic loss of milkweed plants available for monarchs. The plants are essentially a monarch butterfly’s nursery, food source and home. Biofuel subsidies and greater demand for corn have incentivized the planting of the profitable crop on every available acre in some regions, crowding out native plants such as milkweed. Pesticides have also been a factor in milkweed’s demise. One recent study showed that in Iowa, up to 90 percent of native milkweed has disappeared.

In response, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation are partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create a program to encourage the planting of milkweed and reduce the level of toxins that are disrupting the monarchs’ life cycle. As National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara told the Post: “This is one of those keystone species. These are things that don’t make headlines, but they are indicators that something bigger is happening.”

The monarch seems to be following a trajectory to extinction that has been observed with other butterfly species. As Fears reports: “The blueberry-colored Xerces blue disappeared from San Francisco years ago, and recently [the federal government] announced that two subspecies — the rockland skipper and Zestos in South Florida — haven’t been seen since 2004 and are probably extinct. On top of that, pesticide use has also caused a collapse of other pollinators — wasps, beetles and especially honeybees.”