by Vicky Stein
A photo show some butterflies sitting on a flower.
Source: LilKar. Shutterstock
For my 11th birthday, I received a perfect, weird, road-trip amusement: a book filled with pictures and descriptions to help kids decode the splatters of insects that smacked into the front of a moving vehicle. Whether that sounds like macabre fun or makes you grumble about keeping the windshield clean, a steep decline in reported bug splatters in recent years should actually make us worried, entomologists and ecologists say.
In a new study published Tuesday in PLOS ONE, a group of researchers analyzed one of the rare data sets that tracks butterfly abundance, taken from 21 years of volunteer surveys in Ohio. They found an average population decline of 2 percent per year, which means that over the course of the study, Ohio lost more than a third of its butterfly population.
Some species of butterflies showed no change in abundance, however, and a few others actually became more common.
“Not everything is going to decline in exactly the same way,” said Corrie Moreau, an entomologist and evolutionary biologist from Cornell University who was not involved in the new research. “But we are seeing, in this study and others, that insects are in a rapid fall.”
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Question
Read “Butterflies are disappearing in Ohio. Here’s what that means for insects everywhere” below to answer the question.
Which detail in the section “Why this matters” supports the main idea of the section?
(1 point)
Responses
Butterflies pollinate flowers, control plant populations by munching on leaves as caterpillars, and provide food for other insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.
Butterflies pollinate flowers, control plant populations by munching on leaves as caterpillars, and provide food for other insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.
“But I think of the situation as, like, death by a thousand cuts.”
“But I think of the situation as, like, death by a thousand cuts.”
“I think we know enough now to act,” Wepprich said.
“I think we know enough now to act,” Wepprich said.
But butterflies also act as big, flashy beautiful warning signs for environmental change.
But butterflies also act as big, flashy beautiful warning signs for environmental change.
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1 answer
The detail in the section “Why this matters” that supports the main idea of the section is:
Butterflies pollinate flowers, control plant populations by munching on leaves as caterpillars, and provide food for other insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.
This detail emphasizes the ecological importance of butterflies and the broader implications of their decline on the ecosystem.
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