10 animals on the edge of extinction you didn't know about no.3- The Monarch butterfly

The monarch butterfly is an animal you will probably have seen around in your life. It's not the kind of animal you will know the name of, much less the extinction status, but the monarch butterfly is rated "endangered" on the WWF website. It's affected by climate change and humans and its numbers have declined greatly.

Fast Facts

The Monarch Butterfly is a rather small animal, however pretty large for one of its species. Their wingspan ranges from about 90 to 100 mm, the male butterflies being slightly larger than the female. They are orange with a black patterning and white dots on the sides of their wings, the vibrant colours warn predators of their bad taste. Monarch butterflies are known for their migration habits. They are mainly found in northern America, but travel to the south (Mexico or California mainly) to hibernate. These tiny butterflies travel almost 3 thousand kilometres and can be found all over the planet by now. They have adapted with shape and size to live all over the planet! Monarch butterflies usually only live a few weeks, except for those who travel south. Those live for up to 9 months! This results in roughly 4 generations of monarch butterflies a year.
Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants. The caterpillars can be recognized by their vertical stripes of black, white and yellow-green.

Endangerment

Of course, there are more than just a couple of factors to the decline of monarch butterflies, but climate change, deforestation and fewer milkweed plants to lay eggs on are the main problems. We all are aware that climate change alters the general weather and climate of our planet and that that in return affects animals and plants in many ways. The monarch butterfly is very sensitive to that, as different temperatures in its breeding grounds would affect its migration route colder winters would kill the butterflies.

Additionally, the monarch butterfly (like so many animals) is affected by deforestation. It hibernates in the mountain forests in Mexico for example where humans are also active in tourism and agriculture. Pesticides are used in agriculture but also decrease the number of milkweed plants available for the butterflies to lay eggs on, which makes reproducing difficult.

We hope you enjoyed this!

Your Green World Team💚

Image:

Monarch butterfly: This image, owned by Peter Miller (on flickr.com), is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/animal/monarch-butterfly
https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/monarch-butterfly

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