Monitoring For Monarch Butterflies: This Year’s Milkweed Tells The Story
By now, you’ve probably heard of last week's listing of the iconic monarch butterfly on the IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) red list of endangered species. This listing largely does nothing to add the species to have protection for the monarch under the Endangered Species Act in the United States. In December of 2020, the following statement was released: “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) has found that adding the monarch butterfly to the list of threatened and endangered species is warranted but precluded by work on higher-priority listing actions.” The above quote by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can be found in a statement by Jim Lovett of Monarch Watch last week on the Monarch Watch website’s blog (see resources below).
What this doesn’t do is change what monarch conservationists, such as me, are seeing when we monitor this butterfly’s habitat. Monarchs are solely dependent on milkweed to sustain their life cycle. The adults lay their eggs on the milkweed leaves, the larva hatch, and eat ONLY milkweed, the pupa or chrysalis is made somewhere away from the milkweed patch to help avoid predation and the eclosed monarch butterfly is born only to start the cycle all over again. The life cycle of the monarch takes about a month to complete, given optimal conditions, such as temperature…
