- Recently, migratory monarch butterflies have been declared endangered in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species.
- It’s a sub-species of the Danaus plexippus butterfly that travels around 4,000 kilometres across America.
- It’s the most recognizable butterfly species that are essential pollinators and further provides various ecosystem services such as maintaining the global food web.
- A smaller population of the species is also found in countries like Australia, Hawaii, and India.
Issues:
- Their population in the continent has declined 23-72% over the last decade.
- The population of the eastern monarchs that migrate from the eastern United States and Canada — the bigger group — also shrunk by 84% from 1996-2014.
- They follow a unique lifestyle as they breed in only one particular plant The Milkweeds, but the removal of this plant by farmers led to their decrease in population.
- Further, farmers also widely use a weedicide for the removal of milkweeds.
- Weedicide are known as the weed killers or pesticides that are used to kill unwanted plants
- Legal and illegal logging and deforestation make space for agriculture and urban development, which causes habitat destruction.
- Frequent storms and droughts are more intense and disrupt flowering cycles, which led to the killing millions of butterflies.
IUCN
- The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is a global environmental organization that works for the conservation of biodiversity.
- It also supports and participates in environmental scientific research, promotes and helps implement national conservation legislation, policies, and practices, and operates or manages thousands of field projects worldwide.
- Its membership includes more than 1,000 governmental and non-governmental organizations from more than 140 countries.
- It maintains the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, a comprehensive assessment of the current risk of extinction of thousands of plant and animal species.
- The IUCN has been granted observer status at the United Nations General Assembly.
- The IUCN Red List Categories define the extinction risk of species assessed. Nine categories extend from
- NE (Not Evaluated) to EX (Extinct).
- Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN) and Vulnerable (VU) species are considered to be threatened with extinction.
SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT