29 December 2021 (DW) – Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn’t been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its “Winners and Losers of 2021,” an annual […]
By Elizabeth Gamillo 6 October 2021 (Smithsonian) – The American bumblebee (Bombus pensylvanicus)—once abundant and found lazily floating around in grasslands, open prairies, and some urban areas throughout the United States—now face a rapidly declining population. According to a proposed rule released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the species’ population has dropped nearly 90 percent […]
By Nathalie Steinhauer, Dan Aurell, Selina Bruckner, Mikayla Wilson, Karen Rennich, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, and Geoffrey Williams 23 June 2021 (Bee Informed Partnership) – The Bee Informed Partnership (http://beeinformed.org) is a non-profit organization that works alongside beekeepers to improve honey bee colony health and survivorship across the United States. One of the organization’s longest running programs, […]
PORTLAND, Oregon, 19 January 2021 – The Xerces Society today announced that only 1,914 monarch butterflies were recorded overwintering on the California coast this year. This critically low number follows two years with fewer than 30,000 butterflies—the previous record lows—indicating that the western monarch butterfly migration is nearing collapse. The final results from the 24th annual Western […]
By Mike Wolterbeek 4 March 2021 (Nevada Today) – New methods of conservation and management of butterfly habitat may be needed to stem the consistent annual decline in the numbers of butterflies over the past 40 years in the western United States, according to a new study published in the journal Science. “The widespread butterfly […]
By Wendy Caldwell 25 February 2021 MEXICO CITY (Monarch Joint Venture) – The presence of the Monarch butterfly in the Mexican hibernation forests decreased by 26 percent last December, occupying 2.10 hectares (ha) compared to the 2.83 ha reported during the same month in 2019. Meanwhile, the core forest area in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere […]
22 June 2020 (The Bee Informed Partnership) – The western honey bee, the species used across the country to support food production, to provide a natural sweetener, and to quite simply contribute to our leisure and free time, is among the most important of pollinators. To mark Pollinator Week, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) recently […]
By Marlowe Hood 10 February 2020 (PhysOrg) – Half of the one million animal and plant species on Earth facing extinction are insects, and their disappearance could be catastrophic for humankind, scientists have said in a “warning to humanity”. “The current insect extinction crisis is deeply worrying,” said Pedro Cardoso, a biologist at the Finnish […]
By Mike Silver 3 February 2020 MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts (Tufts Now) – Habitat loss, pesticide use and, surprisingly, artificial light are the three most serious threats endangering fireflies across the globe, raising the spectre of extinction for certain species and related impacts on biodiversity and ecotourism, according to a Tufts University-led team of biologists associated with […]
3 February 2020 (BBC News) – A second activist campaigning for the conservation of monarch butterflies and the woods in which they hibernate has been found dead in Mexico. Raúl Hernández worked as a tour guide at a butterfly sanctuary in Michoacán state. His body, which bore signs of beatings and a head injury, was […]
