{"id":6323,"date":"2015-02-11T10:53:43","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T17:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6323"},"modified":"2015-02-24T10:58:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T17:58:02","slug":"monarch-massacre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/02\/11\/monarch-massacre\/","title":{"rendered":"Monarch Massacre"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The monarch massacre: Nearly a billion butterflies have vanished<\/h1>\n

By\u00a0Darryl Fears<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises\u00a0and lions grab all the headlines, but what\u2019s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, about 970 million have vanished.<\/p>\n

It happened as farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies\u2019 nursery, food source and home. In an attempt to counter two decades of destruction, the Fish and Wildlife Service\u00a0launched a partnership<\/a>\u00a0with two private conservation groups, the National Wildlife Federation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, to basically grow milkweed like crazy in the hopes of saving the monarchs.<\/p>\n

Monarch butterflies are a keystone species that once fluttered throughout the United States by the billions. They alighted from Mexico to Canada each spring on a trek that required six generations of the insect to complete. Afterward, young monarchs about the quarter of the weight of a dime, that know nothing about the flight pattern through the United States, not to mention Mexico, fly back, resting, birthing and dining on milkweed. Only about 30 million remain.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at WaPo<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post The monarch massacre: Nearly a billion butterflies have vanished By\u00a0Darryl Fears Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises\u00a0and lions grab all the headlines, but what\u2019s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}