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Strategies & Market Trends : Paint The Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lost1 who wrote (14415)	2/12/2002 11:53:09 PM
From: Augustus Gloop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23786

Ted Baxter Rocked! Now of course he's worm poop

To: Lost1 who wrote (14415)	2/12/2002 11:54:31 PM
From: Lost1	Respond to of 23786

supreme butterfly bummer...we've discussed this natural Monarch migration before ..it's so cool. They pass through TX in droves Storm devastates butterfly colonies Hundreds of millions of monarchs killed in Mexico, researchers say By Carol Kaesuk Yoon The New York Times Tuesday, February 12, 2002 After a severe winter storm in mid-January, in the mountains of central Mexico, dead monarch butterflies lay in piles on the ground, in some places more than a foot high. Between 220 million and 270 million frozen butterflies had rained down from roosts where they normally festooned towering trees, researchers estimated. "It was really macabre," said Lincoln Brower, a butterfly biologist. "I've been going down there for 25 years, and I've never seen anything like it." Most of the monarchs in the two biggest colonies in Mexico were killed in the storm, in the largest known die-off ever of these butterflies, according to a report by Brower and a team of researchers from Mexico and the United States. But the loss of life is not expected to threaten the species, they said. In the report, Brower, who is from Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va., and his colleagues estimated that 74 percent of the monarchs at the Sierra Chincua colony and 80 percent at the Rosario colony had been killed. Along with a few smaller colonies, which scientists have not surveyed, the butterflies in these major colonies make up the entire breeding stock of monarchs for the eastern United States and Canada. The spectacle of the monarchs' long and rugged mass migration north from Mexico each spring, a highly unusual behavior for an insect, has made the species a favorite of nature lovers. The butterflies fly northward, stopping to lay eggs in the southern United States, including Texas. The monarchs that develop from those eggs continue the journey, and by summer, butterflies reach as far north as Canada. The monarchs' epic migration is so exceptional that scientists have called it an "endangered biological phenomenon." If the populations that fly north each year from Mexico were to disappear, the mysteries of that migration might never be solved. While saying it was unlikely that a single event could ring the death knell for the Mexican monarch populations, researchers said the radically reduced numbers left the butterflies vulnerable to future whims of weather and disease and continuing deforestation in and around their winter resting grounds in Mexico. Scientists noted that the species as a whole is not in danger since other smaller populations of monarchs that do not migrate to Mexico can be found elsewhere, such as in the western United States. Scientists will know in coming weeks how precarious the situation of the devastated populations has become as they get a better sense of how many millions survived and what shape the butterflies are in as they begin to move north. "A bad winter followed by a bad spring could be catastrophic," said Karen Oberhauser, a monarch ecologist at the University of Minnesota. Casual observers are unlikely to notice an obvious drop in monarch numbers this spring, in part because of the natural variability in population size from year to year. The Rosario and Sierra Chincua colonies are thought to harbor perhaps two-thirds of all the butterflies in Mexico's monarch sanctuaries, which are located in mountains in the state of Michoacan, west of Mexico City. The report was released Monday by World Wildlife Fund Mexico, which funded the research along with Sweet Briar College and the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation. According to the report, the storm on Jan. 12 and 13 dropped around 4 inches of rain in the area and was followed by freezing temperatures, a deadly combination as monarchs are known to be susceptible to freezing if they become wet.