The main claim that the author makes in the passage is: Butterfly populations are declining.
"Disappearing Ohio Butterflies Affects All Insects"
by Vicky Stein
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
Use the excerpt from “Butterflies are disappearing in Ohio. Here’s what that means for insects everywhere” to answer the question.
What main claim does the author make in the passage?(1 point)
Responses
People dislike having to clean their windshields.
People dislike having to clean their windshields.
Some butterfly populations are stable.
Some butterfly populations are stable.
Butterfly populations are declining.
Butterfly populations are declining.
A study about butterflies was recently published.
A study about butterflies was recently published.
1 answer
1 answer