Three groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act. They say the monarch population nosedived by 90 percent in two decades due to loss of habitat and widespread planting of genetically engineered crops in the Midwest. Many of the biotech crops are engineered to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, which kills milkweed, eaten by the monarch caterpillars that produce the butterflies. The Fish and Wildlife Service is required to issue a finding in the near term on whether to proceed with the petition.
“The monarch is the canary in the cornfield, a harbinger of environmental change that we’ve brought about on such a broad scale that many species of pollinators are now at risk if we don’t take action to protect them,” said monarch researcher Lincoln Brower of Sweet Briar College. The anti-GMO Center for Food Safety said the decline of the monarch butterfly “is driven by the massive spraying of herbicides on genetically engineered crops.” Besides Brower and the Center for Food Safety, the petition was submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Xerces Society.