Tag Archives: extinction
Good news about monarchs, but…
News headlines often bear a second look. And this week’s “good news” about monarch butterflies is no exception. News sources this week are reporting that monarch butterfly colonies covered almost 15 acres of Mexican mountainside in 2019, a 144% increase from last winter. Colony sizes are based on estimates of the total acreage of trees covered with monarchs in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico–the main overwintering site for eastern monarch butterflies. Acreage estimates provide an index as to how many butterflies survived the previous year’s… Read More →
What good are mosquitoes?
An article in the July 21 online edition of Nature magazine posed researchers the question, “Would it be a good thing if all mosquitoes were eradicated from the earth?” I’ve often been posed a similar question in slightly different form, namely, “what good are mosquitoes?” Aside from the purely speculative question that Nature asked (we couldn’t get rid of all the mosquitoes in the world in a thousand years if we tried), perhaps a more realistic question would be, “If we could get rid of even one mosquito… Read More →