[Pollinator] SFGate: Mexico Funds Will Protect Butterflies

[Laurie Adams]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/11/25/international/i150121S97.DTL
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, November 25, 2007 (AP)
Mexico Funds Will Protect Butterflies
By JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX, Associated Press Writer


   (11-25) 20:29 PST CERRO PRIETO, Mexico (AP) --

   President Felipe Calderon unveiled a sweeping plan Sunday to curb logging
and protect millions of monarch butterflies that migrate to the mountains
of central Mexico each winter, covering trees and bushes and attracting
visitors from around the world.

   The plan will put $4.6 million toward additional equipment and advertising
for the existing Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, covering a
124,000-acre swathe of trees and mountains that for thousands of years has
served as the winter nesting ground to millions of orange- and
black-winged monarch butterflies.

   Calderon said it would help boost tourism and support the economy in an
impoverished area where illegal logging runs rampant.

   "It is possible to take care of the environment and at the same time
promote development," the president said.

   The new initiative is part of ongoing efforts to protect the butterflies,
which are a huge tourist attraction and the pride of Mexico. In some
areas, officials can even be found standing guard along highways and
slowing cars that might accidentally hit a butterfly flying across the
road.

   The plan also meshes nicely with one of Calderon's main policy planks:
protecting the environment and combatting global warming. He has drawn up
a national anti-global warming plan and committed to plant some 250
million trees in 2007.

   While the monarch butterfly does not appear on any endangered species
lists, experts say illegal logging in Mexico threatens its existence in
North America because it removes the foliage that protects the delicate
insects from the cold and rain.

   "By even taking a single tree out near the butterfly colony you allow heat
to escape from the forest and that then jeopardizes the butterflies," said
Lincoln Brower, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Florida
and at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va.

   Brower, who has studied the insects for 52 years, described the Mexican
nesting grounds as "the Mecca of the whole insect world."

   The reserve already receives some $36.4 million in government funding, and
its staff includes a team of park rangers who patrol the area equipped
with assault rifles and body armor searching for armed gangs of lumber
thieves.

   The World Wildlife Fund and the Mexican Fund for Nature Conservation say
the efforts are paying off. They say this year saw a 48 percent drop in
illegal logging, compared to a year ago.

   "We're gaining ground in the fight against illegal logging," Calderon
said.

   Each September, the butterflies begin their 3,400-mile journey from the
forests of eastern Canada and parts of the United States to the central
Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered an aesthetic and scientific
wonder.

   The butterflies return to the U.S. and Canada in late March, where they
breed and cycle through up to five generations before heading back south.
Scientists say they are genetically programmed to return to Mexico, where
they settle into the same mountains their ancestors inhabited the year
before.

   According to Brower, sometimes they even return to the exact same trees
— probably because previous monarchs have marked the area through a
mechanism scientists don't yet understand.

   The monarchs that spend the winter in Mexico do not reproduce until they
return to the U.S. and have a much longer life span than those born in the
spring and summer.

   Omar Vidal, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Mexico program,
applauded Calderon's plan.

   "This is the longest migration of all insects, a unique phenomenon and a
natural wonder and Mexico has the biggest responsibility to protect them
because they come here to hibernate," he said.

   Brower said the monarch isn't at risk of extinction because it can be
found in Mexico, Canada, the U.S., most of South America and even parts of
Australia and New Zealand. But disappearing habitat could threaten a
delicate migratory route that has existed for an estimated 10,000 years.

   "The whole migratory phenomenon which involves two continents and over a
million square miles could just go down the drain," he said. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2007 AP