Staff at the Goleta Monarch Butterfly Grove at Ellwood Mesa have counted only two butterflies so far this year.
Charis van der Heide, a biologist and volunteer with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, the organization that manages the Western Monarch count.
“ It's incredibly low,” van der Heide said. “Just for context, maybe 20 years ago there were 50,000 butterflies just in one spot at Elwood Mesa.”
van der Heide said monarch populations are “bouncy,” meaning they do tend to fluctuate year to year. Numbers too low, however, could cause a population crash,
“What's shocking is that the monarch population is bouncing so low, we're worried as biologists it will get too low to be sustainable from one year to the next,” van der Heide said.
Possible causes for this local decline include overly hot summers and even the recent winter storms that hit the Central Coast.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife says monarch butterfly populations have declined over the past twenty years, with especially low numbers at overwintering sites like Ellwood Mesa in the last several years. The agency cited pesticide use and climate change as factors.
