Mexico seeks to save monarch butterfly habitat
(c) 2000 Reuters Limited
September 14, 2000
Story by Lorraine Orlandi
Mexico, prompted by a new study showing that the fragile monarch butterfly is facing the rapid destruction of its winter habitat, has proposed more than tripling the size of its reserve.
Mexican and international scientists have suspected for years that the central Mexican mountain forest to which the large orange-and-black butterflies migrate annually from Canada was rapidly deteriorating because of clear-cut logging and farming.
A study published in the media on Tuesday confirmed their fears, revealing that 44 percent of the original forest had disappeared since 1971, including in protected areas. At that rate, all the original forest would be gone in less than 50 years.
"We thought it was going down pretty fast, but when we saw this data, we were all shocked at the rate it was going, and I think the Mexican government was equally shocked," Lincoln Brower, a biologist at Virginia's Sweet Briar College who has studied the monarch for decades, told Reuters.
"The destruction is brutal," agreed Mario Guillermo Huacuja, a spokesman for the Environmental Ministry.
TOTAL AREA OF 216 SQUARE MILES
In response to the study, completed in August, the ministry last week presented a plan to expand the size of the reserve from 62 square miles (16,000 hectares) to 216 square miles (56,000 hectares), including increasing the so-called core zone by 15 square miles (4,000 hectares) to 46 square miles (12,000 hectares). Tree cutting is prohibited in the core zone and permitted but regulated in the surrounding buffer zone.
Local communities protested against the plan, saying their livelihoods had already suffered from limitations set when the wintering sites were protected in 1986.
In response, the government proposed buying logging rights from residents to compensate for lost income while developing
alternative sources of jobs - mainly tourism around the reserve - Huacuja said.
At risk is a creature with paper-thin wings that Huacuja called "an emblem of North America" and Brower described as a
"world-class phenomenon, a work of art."
The monarch butterflies have just begun this year's fall journey across the Central and Eastern United States and Canada to Mexico, where they will festoon the trees until returning north to lay eggs in April.
HABITAT CHANGE MAY BE IMPLICATED
While the insects' numbers do not appear to have been affected, scientists have seen changes in migration patterns that could be due to alterations in their Mexican habitat.
The monarchs are leaving Mexico earlier than normal, returning north to lay eggs while the weather is still cold enough to threaten their offspring, Brower said.
The study of the reserve was the first to use aerial photographs, dating to 1971, to map the extent of destruction.
Even where intact forest remains, it has been reduced to isolated patches, hurting the entire ecosystem's defences.
"When you break up forest into lots of
different patches, its biological metabolism goes to the dogs, and that's what's been happening there at an alarming rate," Brower said.
The plan to compensate local residents for lost earnings is unprecedented in Mexico.
An unnamed international organisation has pledged $5 million to establish a trust fund if the communities agree, said Guillermo Castilleja, Mexican representative for the World Wildlife Fund.
"The most important difference has to be some kind of deal with local communities so that they can benefit from conservation," Castilleja said.
"I don't think it's ethically acceptable that in the name of conservation we limit access to resources on which these communities depend," he said. "We can't exclude them because we believe the region needs to be protected."