By Suzanne Potter, California News Service
Photo via Pixabay
February 5, 2021 (Pismo Beach, CA). -- The Western Monarch butterfly population that overwinters in California has dropped to devastating levels, with only 1,914 individuals spotted in this year's winter count.
They've been declining for decades, but experts say they may have reached an extinction threshold in 2018 when volunteers only counted 30,000.
Angela Laws, endangered-species conservation biologist for the Xerces Society, said the population appears to be collapsing.
"It's a 99.9% drop from the '80s, when there were an estimated four million monarchs overwintering along the California coast," Laws outlined. "It's a big drop in their population. It's very worrying."
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