Brower to Lecture at Explorers Club Meeting in Washington

From staff reports

Lincoln P. Brower, research professor of biology, will present “The Grand Saga of the Monarch Butterfly” to the Washington-area Explorers Club at the group’s dinner meeting on May 17.

An announcement for Brower’s lecture notes that, although the monarch is one of America’s most common butterflies and is not endangered as a species, its “marvelous adaptive repertoire has become an endangered biological phenomenon.”

According to the announcement, major threats to the monarch’s annual migration pattern include farming with genetically engineered crops in the North American heartland, forest degradation in the monarchs’ overwintering areas in the volcanic highlands of central Mexico and human encroachment on coastal overwintering habitat.

Brower will consider positive approaches on how to implement successful conservation of the species’ unique biological phenomenon. The lecture will draw on his 54 years of research on monarchs, 31 years of visiting the Mexican colonies, and will be illustrated with still and video imagery taken on the ground, in the air and from outer space.