Butterflies are disappearing in the United States.
Butterflies are disappearing in the United States. All kinds of them. With a speed scientists call alarming, and they are sounding an alarm.
A sweeping new study published in Science for the first time tallies butterfly data from more than 76,000 surveys across the continental United States. The results: between 2000 and 2020, total butterfly abundance fell by 22% across the 554 species counted. That means that for every five individual butterflies within the contiguous U.S. in the year 2000, there were only four in 2020.
“Action must be taken,” said Elise Zipkin, a Red Cedar Distinguished Professor of quantitative ecology at Michigan State University and a co-author of the paper. “To lose 22 percent of butterflies across the continental U.S. in just two decades is distressing and shows a clear need for broad-scale conservation interventions.”
Zipkin and her MSU colleague and co-author Nick Haddad, professor of integrative biology, have been major figures in drilling down the state of U.S. butterflies. Zipkin has been a formidable numbers cruncher with successes gleaning hard facts from imperfect data sets to better understand the natural world.
Read more at Michigan State University
Photo Credit: terski via Pixabay
