The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday it is proposing to list a butterfly native to San Diego County as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
https://www.kusi.com/san-diego-butterfly-proposed-for-protection-under-the-endangered-species-act/
ROSARIO, Mexico — No one knows when millions of monarch butterflies began crisscrossing North America, spending their winters clustered on the same hillsides in Central Mexico, a blaze of orange wings in the green forest.
This weekend, a hundred and sixty monarch butterfly experts and enthusiasts from all over the country met in Carmel for the first-ever Western Monarch Summit, to discuss the “state of the western monarch.” The species numbers’ have been on a downward trend since the ‘80s but last winter, monarchs in California made the news because they had a really steep decline in their population, dropping to such low numbers that scientists warned they could go extinct. Everyone has been holding their breath to hear what the numbers are this year. There is good news and bad news.
https://www.kalw.org/post/will-monarch-butterflies-bounce-back#stream/0
The monarch butterfly population on the West Coast has been trending downward since the 1980s, but early in 2019 the insects really made the news when numbers from annual Thanksgiving and New Year’s counts dropped below 30,000, the point at which scientists say the butterflies might not be able to recover.
A new study from Columbia Engineering and Harvard identified the critical physiological importance of suitable temperatures for butterfly wings to function properly, and discovered that the insects exquisitely regulate their wing temperatures through both structural and behavioral adaptations.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/cuso-bth012420.php
