MoJo: What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall "in Love" With GMOs?

[ND-Dem]

9. To get a sense why the monarch butterflies are in decline, I called Lincoln Brower, a professor of

biology at Sweet Briar College who has studied the monarch migrations for decades. In a paper last year, he cited three major factors: Deforestation in Mexico, recent bouts of severe weather, and the growth of herbicide-based agriculture destroying crucial milkweed flora in the Midwest.

LB: The three big reasons: Severe weather was working against the butterflies for the last two years. Another is the progressive deterioration of the overwintering habitat in Mexico due to illegal deforestation. But the third and probably the most egregious problem is the result of industrialized agriculture in the Midwest.

BP: You also mentioned Midwestern agriculture as a third factor in the decline. What's happening there?

LB: The most catastrophic thing from the point of view of the monarch butterfly has been the expansion of crops that are planted on an unbelievably wide scale throughout the Midwest and have been genetically manipulated to be resistant to the powerful herbicide Roundup.

These crops are planted in the grassland ecosystems of the United States, where the monarchs do most of their breeding. And normally in that area there are milkweed growing all over the place on the agricultural fields and the edges of fields and the sides of roads. There are 108 species of milkweed in the United States — the whole monarch migration evolved in relation to evolution of this milkweed flora.

Anyway, where they use these herbicides, it kills all emergent seedlings and all the emergent perennial plants. A paper last year by John Pleasants of the University of Iowa and Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota estimated that 60 percent of milkweed has been eliminated from the grassland ecosystem. We're not just talking about one species, we're talking about the entire native flora being eliminated.

The other thing herbicides do is kill sources of nectar. This is important: When monarchs come back (to the United States) they lay their eggs on milkweed, the caterpillars hatch out in four or five days and develop over a period of two or three weeks, then form the chrysalis, then a week later it hatches into an adult. These adults initially have about 20 milligrams of fat in their body that's carried over from larval development. But the butterflies that migrate back (to Mexico) have about 125 mg of fat. All that additional fat is gotten from drinking nectar from wildflowers. And this agriculture is killing off the wildflowers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/03/why-are-the-monarch-butterflies-disappearing/

Lincoln Brower first began studying monarch butterfly biology in 1954 when he was a graduate student at Yale University. He currently is Distinguished Service Professor of Zoology Emeritus at the University of Florida and Research Professor of Biology at Sweet Briar College.

http://www.monarchbutterflyfund.org/node/137

Dr. Lincoln Brower describes himself as “a student and admirer of the monarch.” He probably knows more about monarch butterflies than anyone else in the world!

Dr. Brower has studied monarchs for over 50 years! He has written so many scientific papers about monarchs that it takes 15 pages just to list their titles. Dr. Brower was studying monarchs even before the over-wintering colonies in Mexico were known to science. He conducted the early research there and he continues to do research in Mexico today.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/BrowerBio.html