Good News, Bad News (Mostly Bad)

The iconic migratory monarch butterfly is now, officially, “endangered,” according to  the IUCN, which this week entered Danaus plexippus plexippus into its Red List of Threatened Species.

The colorful flyer, known for its annual 2500-mile migration across the Americas, is being pushed to the brink of extinction by the twin forces of habitat loss and climate change.

The IUCN reckons that the native population of the migratory monarch, a subspecies of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), has shrunk by between 22% and 72% over the past decade. With “legal and illegal logging and deforestation to make space for agriculture and urban development,” butterflies’ breeding grounds in Mexico and California are under siege. Meanwhile pesticides and herbicides kill both butterflies and milkweed, the primary food source of the monarch as larvae.

If that’s not bad enough, climate change is coming fast and furious: “drought limits the growth of milkweed and increases the frequency of catastrophic wildfires, temperature extremes trigger earlier migrations before milkweed is available, while severe weather has killed millions of butterflies.”

The news is not good for the world’s sturgeon populations either, as the IUCN now says that all 26 species are at risk of extinction. Dam construction, warmer rivers, and the perpetual human craving for caviar are driving the global pescacide.

There is one bit of good(ish) news. The status of the tiger has been reassessed, with a new census calculating between 3,726 and 5,578 tigers in the wild worldwide, a 40% increase since the last assessment in 2015. It is believed that the new figures are the result of better monitoring – not necessarily more tigers – but it suggests the possibility that populations could be stable or even increasing.

We have to do better.

Photo credit: Joe Schelling