Petition Seeks to Protect Monarchs

A petition has been submitted to include monarch butterflies under the Endangered Species Act. Photo by Len Villano.

A legal petition was filed on Aug. 26 with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that seeks Endangered Species Act protection for monarch butterflies. The petition says there has been a 90 percent decline in monarchs in the past two decades.

The petitioners say the decline is due to the “drastically reduced and degraded” monarch habitat, which has been caused by development, logging, climate change and, especially, pesticides.

The two-decade time frame is important because it relates to the introduction of genetically engineered crops that are resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s widely used weed killer Roundup). In 1996 Monsanto introduced “Roundup Ready” soybeans that were genetically engineered to resist Roundup. Two years later Monsanto introduced “Roundup Ready” corn. Today, 94 percent of soybeans and 89 percent of corn grown in the United States are “Roundup Ready” crops.

The petition notes that Roundup use in 1995 – the year before the introduction of genetically engineered soybeans – was 10 million pounds a year. In 2013 it was 204 million pounds.

The petitioners claim that the overuse of Roundup has led to the decline of the milkweed plant in America’s Corn Belt, and milkweed is the only place where a monarch will lay its eggs.

“The majority of the world’s monarchs originate in the Corn Belt region of the United States, where milkweed loss has been severe, and the threat that this habitat loss poses to the resiliency, redundancy and representation of the monarch cannot be overstated,” the petitioners wrote.

The petitioners include the Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Food Safety, the Xerces Society (a nonprofit organization at the forefront of invertebrate conservation) and Dr. Lincoln Brower, a biologist who has been studying monarch butterflies since 1954.

“Monarchs are in a deadly free fall and the threats they face are now so large in scale that Endangered Species Act protection is needed sooner rather than later, while there is still time to reverse the severe decline in the heart of their range,” Brower said in a press release announcing the petition.

While not a signatory to the petition, Karen Oberhauser was involved in drafting the petition. A professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota, Oberhauser was in Door County this week to deliver a talk on Sept. 3 about the impact of climate change on the monarch population as part of the Climate Change Coalition of Door County’s monthly presentations.

“My research has looked at the potential impacts both in winter and summer breeding period,” Oberhauser said.

What she learned is that monarchs follow very specific climactic patterns when migrating north in the spring and south in the fall.

“With changes in climate patterns, we expect they will need to move further north,” she said. “We expect a higher frequency of storms in their wintering grounds, not that the climate will get warmer, but it’s a problem for them when there are big storms in the winter, which we’ve seen a fair number of in the last decade and a half.”

She said this would either cause a move further north or a narrower geographical range for the butterflies.

“It depends on their behavior and the movement of milkweed,” she said.

Oberhauser said even if the petition is denied, just bringing it forward will draw more attention to the problem.

She cites a book called The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin.

“When something is owned in common, nobody takes responsibility for it,” she said. “This is a problem with many causes. There are a lot of things that are contributing to the decline of monarch numbers. Probably the biggest is habitat loss. Certainly the loss of habitat in agricultural row crops has been very important. Over the last decade, herbicide-tolerant crops were very closely tied to the decline in monarch numbers. It’s certainly not the only cause, but it was a big factor.”

However, she added, even though we may not like the way food is produced in the United States, that’s not something that is going to change fast enough to save the monarchs.

“We need to solve the monarch decline quickly or they will be gone,” Oberhauser said.

That means restoring habitat, both milkweed and nectar plants for the adults to feed on.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has 90 days to review the petition.

“That’s what was written into the law,” Oberhauser said. “In reality, they just don’t have the person power to respond in 90 days. We’re not expecting them to rule in 90 days, just to decide if they will go through the whole listing process. The bad news is there are a lot of species that need their consideration.”