A coalition has filed a petition on behalf of the monarch butterfly to ask that the bright orange insect be given endangered species protection to help mitigate its rapidly declining numbers.
The environmental and food safety groups that have made the request say that the monarch butterfly's population in the U.S. fell last year to 90 percent below its 20-year average, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
"Monarchs are in a deadly free fall and the threats they face are now so large in scale that Endangered Species Act protection is needed sooner rather than later, while there is still time to reverse the severe decline in the heart of their range," Lincoln Brower, a monarch butterfly researcher and conservationist who has been studying the species since 1954, said in a statement.
The monarch population has declined from an estimated 1 billion butterflies in the mid-1990s to just 35 million butterflies last winter, said a Center for Biological Diversity press release.
Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the center, compared the 90 percent decrease in monarch butterfly numbers to "losing every living person in the United States except those in Florida and Ohio" if it were put in terms of human population.
The species is under threat after milkweed in the Midwest has greatly diminished, taking away the monarch's source of food in the area where most of the butterflies are born, according to the coalition.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety filed the request as co-lead petitioners on Aug. 26 and were joined by the Xerces Society.
The groups blame the near-disappearance of milkweed plants on Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, which is a "uniquely potent" milkweed killer and is used for fields of crops that have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide's mix of chemicals.
"The widespread decline of monarchs is driven by the massive spraying of herbicides on genetically engineered crops, which has virtually eliminated monarch habitat in cropland that dominates the Midwest landscape," Bill Freese, a Center for Food Safety science policy analyst, said in a statement. "Doing what is needed to protect monarchs will also benefit pollinators and other valuable insects, and thus safeguard our food supply."
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