by Rod Bastanmehr
January 31, 2014

from Salon Website

 

The butterfly's numbers are in decline,

and this agriculture conglomerate

is destroying their environment
 

Monsanto may have just found yet another reason to be hated.

The Monarch Butterfly's life cycle has always been in sync with the seasonal growth of milkweed, which remains the only plant in the planet's ecosystem that the butterfly larvae will eat.

The emergence of milkweed across the world has made generations of monarchs travel from Mexico to as far north as Canada in an effort to feed off of the spring-time plant.

Now, however, the World Wildlife Fund has announced that the number of monarchs reaching Mexico in the last year has been falling steadily, and has reached the lowest level on record, found in 1.7 acres across 11 sanctuaries, down from the high of 45 acres in 1996.

The reason is simple: 

As Slate reports, the monarch population began to steadily sink as a result of grasslands rapidly being wiped out in favor of corn and soybean fields - a rate of loss, the report states, comparable to the deforestation of Brazil and Indonesia.

Monsanto Company's well-known, utterly toxic Roundup Weed Killer is largely to blame for the decline, since it kills everything around it including milkweed, which is down by 80%.

"We have this smoking gun," said Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Minnesota. "This is the only thing that we've actually been able to correlate with decreasing monarch numbers."