InvestorsHub Logo
Followers 329
Posts 92770
Boards Moderated 3
Alias Born 07/06/2002

Re: None

Thursday, 04/11/2019 10:57:43 PM

Thursday, April 11, 2019 10:57:43 PM

Post# of 12421

To save the monarch butterfly, Mexican scientists are moving a forest 1,000 feet up a mountain



By Kate Linthicum
Apr 09, 2019 | 4:00 AM

VIDEO (1:57)
As climate change threatens the habitats of migrating monarch butterflies, citizens and scientists in Mexico are taking a novel approach: planting new forests at higher altitudes.

As a boy, Francisco Ramirez Cruz loved hiking with his grandfather up into the mountains of central Mexico. While the old man grazed sheep or hunted for wild mushrooms, Ramirez would play amid the throngs of monarch butterflies that migrated 3,000 miles to this forest each autumn, turning the blue sky into a sea of orange.

Ramirez is 75 now, himself a great-grandfather, and each winter he still goes looking for butterflies. But these days, he might spend hours searching the forest without catching sight of a single one.

The world is losing monarch butterflies at a startling rate, as logging, herbicides and other human activities destroy natural habitats. But the biggest threat yet has only recently come into focus. Climate change, with its extreme storms, prolonged droughts and warming temperatures, is poised to eradicate the forest that serves as the butterfly’s winter refuge.

To help his beloved butterflies, Ramirez has partnered with scientists on a monumental experiment: They are trying to move an entire forest 1,000 feet up a mountain.

On one of the scientists’ early scouting trips to the region several years ago, locals suggested they meet Ramirez, a respected farmer with graying sideburns and a thin mustache who lives on a windswept hillside in Ejido La Mesa, a community that overlaps with the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve — a national park 70 miles west of Mexico City.

Known by the honorific “Don Pancho,” Ramirez is a former elected leader of La Mesa and is hailed as a hero for helping to bring electricity to the area in the late 1980s. Most importantly, he knows the forest intimately, thanks to the time he spent there, starting in the 1950s.

Ramirez has seen the effects of climate change firsthand — parched fields in the winter, violent thunderstorms in the summer — and felt a calling to protect the butterflies, whose annual arrival and departure have long helped the community mark the passage of time.

Each fall, when the butterflies arrive as if by magic from Canada and the eastern United States, gliding by the millions down over the rolling hills of La Mesa, locals stop what they are doing and look up to admire them. They do the same each spring, when the butterflies depart.

STORY CONTINUES AT:
https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-col1-mexico-monarch-butterfly-20190409-htmlstory.html







Dan

Join the InvestorsHub Community

Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.