Though the monarch has long been considered under threat, its listing on the IUCN Red List marks the first time it has been officially declared at risk of extinction
butterfly—the iconic subspecies common to North America—was declared endangered today by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature , the global leading authority on the status of biological diversity.
“It’s hard for people to imagine that something that shows up in their backyard is threatened,” says Anna Walker, who led the monarch butterfly assessment. She’s a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Butterfly and Moth Specialist Group, and species survival officer at the New Mexico BioPark Society.
Sturgeons are considered to be living fossils because the fish remain largely unchanged since the earliest fossil records. They date back 145 million years, and coexisted with dinosaurs. The past winter, however, offered some hope. A community-science count of butterflies at 283 winter nesting grounds in California, led by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, saw a rebound for the western monarch butterfly: 250,000 butterflies were recorded, up from 1,914 in 2021. Winter counts are the most reliable way to monitor populations, Walker says, because nesting sites are massed in a small area, making counts more reliable.
There is hope for the resiliency of monarchs too, Walker says. Insects reproduce quickly “so that gives a great opportunity: If we reduce some threats, the butterfly can do the rest of the work,” she says.
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