Word: monarches
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With its flamboyant orange-and-black wings and incredible 1,000-mile migratory flights, the monarch butterfly is one of the world's best-known and most beloved insects. And like a miner's canary, it has become a kind of biological early-warning system, succumbing to environmental changes long before humans notice them. Last week the monarch sounded another alert--fanning new fears about bioengineered crops...
With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, agritech companies aren't eager to draw sweeping conclusions from the Cornell experiments. "Obviously the work is preliminary and inconclusive," says Monsanto spokesman Randy Krotz, minimizing the possibility that corn pollen could ever be blown far enough to affect monarch habitats. But it was just such a discovery--of pollen-dusted milkweed 200 ft. from the edge of cornfields--that prompted Losey's study in the first place. Says he: "We asked ourselves, 'What would happen if the milkweed would be dusted with Bt [corn pollen]?'" His experiments quickly gave an answer...
Losey is eager to take the experiments into the field, to measure pollen density at various distances from its source so as to determine risk to monarch larvae at each site. Says Losey: "We have to weigh the costs and benefits [of Bt corn], then decide as a society what we want." But that decision may already have been made. The Bt gene is now regularly spliced into potatoes (as protection against the Colorado potato beetle) and cotton (against the boll weevil...
...MONARCH BUTTERFLY Genetically altered corn may be lethal to the monarch butterfly. Proletariat butterflies, unite...
...problems of unintended consequences," says TIME senior science reporter David Bjerklie. The issue now is to find out through field research how significant those consequences are. For instance, how far can the pollen travel from a cornfield? Can it travel far enough to nearby fields of milkweed, the monarch?s food source, in significantly harmful quantities? Some other questions: Does the pollen travel during the same period that the monarchs feed on the milkweed? How much milkweed is near cornfields as opposed to other areas? And can Bt corn be modified further? Clearly the Cornell study has flashed an amber...