MEXICO CITY - A cold front that wiped out millions of monarch butterflies in central Mexico last month may reduce next year's migrations.
"Most probably the population will fall," the World Wildlife Fund Mexico director Juan Bezaury Creel said yesterday.
"This is not about the extinction of the species, although we cannot
know for sure what is going to happen."
The WWF said as many as 250 million monarch butterflies might have been killed by a massive cold front that swept across Michoacan state on January 12-13.
The conservation group, which is funding the protection of monarch reserves in Mexico, said the butterflies died because of a combination of cold weather and rain.
Millions of the butterflies migrate each year from Canada to the Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Michoacan, a hilly region carpeted in pine trees.
The phenomenon was discovered in the mid-1970s, although scientists are unsure when it began.
Dr Lincoln Brower, a specialist in monarch butterflies, said "this was the worst episode of butterfly mortality" he had seen in 25 years studying the insects.
The cold snap killed as many as 80 per cent of butterflies in certain colonies at the reserve, but it was not clear how many monarchs survived the cold.
Other than the poor weather, Mexico's monarchs, which arrive in November and depart in March, have been affected by illegal deforestation in the area that is robbing the butterflies of the protection of their natural habitat.
Bezaury said Mexico's Environment Ministry was looking into the monarch deaths and checking if cold weather hovering over central Mexico in recent days is causing further damage.
- REUTERS
nzherald.co.nz/environment
