By: LUCAS ADAMS
Staff Writer
The population of Monarch butterflies on the California coast has rebounded for the second year in a row. Volunteers were tracking over 330,000 which is the highest number of butterflies there has been in 6 years. Last year there were about 250,000 butterflies and now people are starting to get more excited over how the population is rising modestly. This modest growth tells them that the population has another chance to reach its past glory.
An explanation for why the population is having such a resurgence may be due to how the Eastern counterpart to the Western Monarch Butterfly, Eastern Monarch Butterfly, spends its winter in Mexico which would allow both species to breed with one another.
Scientists say that Butterflies are critically low in population in western states due to the destruction of their milkweed habitats along their migration route as housing expands. Farming and climate change are the main disruptors of the Monarch butterflies migration which is pushing them more and more into extinction. It was also reported that the Monarch’s winter habitat along California’s central coast was also battered by heavy rain.
It’s expected that there will be an increase in mortality due to the intense storms and how back-to-back they are. This leads to a small breeding population for the spring and summer which could be catastrophic for the butterflies.
A Monarch Breeding Cluster