Georgia residents can expect to see monarch butterflies two times during the year: in the spring, when the orange and black insects lay their eggs all over the state, and in the fall, when adult butterflies make a pitstop during their 3,000-mile journey back to their overwintering grounds in Mexico.
But starting in the mid-’90s, researchers noticed that monarchs were struggling. Elise Zipkin, a quantitative ecologist at Michigan State University, says glyphosate weed killers like Roundup were killing the milkweed plants the butterflies needed to lay their eggs.
“But since the mid-2000s, the amount of glyphosate application rate has stayed pretty steady,” she says. “And the monarchs have still declined.”
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