Monarchs Migrating Toward Extinction Recent Snowstorm, Ongoing Logging Threaten Butterflies At Winter Home

Monarch butterflies could be extinct within 20 years if logging continues at current levels in their Mexican wintering ground, American and Mexican environmentalists warned Friday.

A late December snowstorm that killed millions of monarch butterflies after their annual migration to Mexico has many concerned about their long-term survival.

Some experts say logging, which reduces the canopy in the Mexico evergreen forests where the vivid orange-and-black butterflies spend the winter, threatens the species’ survival. The tree cover keeps the butterflies warm and dry.

“If logging continues - even in peripheral areas of the forest - then I predict the monarch butterfly will be extinct in 20 years,” said Lincoln Brower, a University of Florida zoologist who has studied the species for the last two decades.

“If we lose the unique butterfly migration, it is equivalent to losing one of nature’s greatest works of art.”

Every year, the monarchs travel 3,100 miles from Canada through the United States and into Mexico, where - beginning in early November - they reside in a state of semi-hibernation. They return to Canada five months later.

Biologists and the Mexican environmental organization Group of 100 called on the government to reduce pressures on the forests.

They asked the government to consider expanding the reserve - high mountains covering 6,400 square miles in Michoacan state - in southwestern Mexico. They also want more conservation measures and economic incentives to wean peasants who live in the reserve from logging.

“The needs of the monarch are in conflict with the needs of the local population, but there are alternatives,” said Laura Snook, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University. “Ecotourism might yield more money for the peasants than logging would.”