Mexican President Expands Butterfly Forest Haven
© Environment News Service (ENS) 2000
November 9, 2000
MEXICO CITY, Mexico, November 9, 2000 (ENS) - The fragile orange and black monarch butterfly has won habitat protection from a strong coalition of conservation organizations, local communities and the Mexican government.
Every fall, all of the hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies (Daneaus plexippus) from east of the Rocky Mountains head south from Canada and the United States to take refuge in one winter retreat - a unique Mexican forest 70 miles west of Mexico City.
Today, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo officially decreed a new Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve to protect more of the oyamel (balsam fir) forest where the monarchs live during the winter months. The newly protected area will connect the current butterfly sanctuaries within the forest with a linking corridor.
The decree will implement a system through which local people will be financially compensated for their lost logging rights in the preserve.
(WWF) has helped the Mexican government design this innovative strategy that includes the establishment of a trust fund, initially capitalized through a $5 million grant from the Packard Foundation, to support long-term conservation of the monarch butterfly winter sanctuary.
"Linking an innovative economic incentive to the declaration of the new monarch reserve will give a significant boost to monarch protection," said Kathryn Fuller, president of the World Wildlife Fund, the American branch of the international WWF.
"Our hope is that the new decree will provide a "win-win" situation for all stakeholders, ensuring the survival of these extraordinary creatures for future generations," Fuller said.
In the 1940s, when University of Toronto entomologist Fred Urquhart and his wife Norah began tracing the monarchs' fall migration by tagging their wings, the Mexican forest was undisturbed. By the mid-seventies, when the monarchs' unique winter haven was reported to the scientific community, scientists began to see the first signs of trouble in the monarch's winter habitat.
Dr. Lincoln Brower, a monarch butterfly biologist at Sweet Briar College, noticed in January 1977 that the forest was being logged, and that a sawmill operator was expanding his operation toward the butterfly colonies.
Since then, Brower has been documenting the ongoing degradation of the forest and its impact on the monarch. Through a series of aerial photographs taken in the 1970s, 1983 and 1999.
The resulting study, authored by Brower with colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the World Wildlife Fund, and recently submitted to the Mexican government, shows that 44 percent of the forest has been damaged or destroyed since the butterfly roosts were discovered.
Despite a 1986 Mexican presidential decree designating the area as a protected reserve for monarch butterflies, the forest is being thinned and fragmented, to the extent that the average size of the conserved patches or forest decreased nearly 90 percent to 500 acres, the study found.
The degradation of the forest exposes the butterflies to numerous threats. A functional oyamel forest ecoregion in Mexico has been scientifically documented as critical to the survival of the monarch butterfly migration.
This migratory flight of the monarchs has been recognized by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as an endangered biological phenomenon and the first priority in world butterfly conservation.
"The Achilles heel of the monarch butterfly is the cutting of the oyamel forests. We could lose the whole [monarch butterfly] migratory phenomenon if the present rate of destruction of these forests is not stopped immediately," says Brower.
"Like the canary in the coal mine, if the monarch falls, then we might have major ecosystem collapse. If in fact, this species goes, we may see a major toppling of other species going with it," warns Brower.