# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How To Draw with Mark Kistler: Treasure Chest in 3-D!

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How To Draw with Mark Kistler: Stacking Cylinders in 3-D!

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Your hub to create, contribute, and learn with Sphero robots.

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code: xwfzqq

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Duolingo is the world's most popular way to learn a language. It's 100% free, fun and science-based. Practice online on duolingo.com or on the apps!

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Test how smart you are at distinguishing Facts from Opinions.

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Battle for Butterflies

The fight to bring back North America's dwindling migratory monarchs

AFTER PASSING THE WINTER hunkered down on evergreens in central Mexico or coastal California, monarch butterflies are on the move again this spring. Fluttering 25 to 30 miles a day, the insects are headed north and east toward breeding grounds that by mid-summer will stretch from coast to coast across the United States and as far north as southern Canada.

Conservationists hope gardeners will spot more of the beloved orange-and-black butterflies in their yards this year than last. As this issue went to press in February, Mexican researchers had just announced results of their annual survey of monarchs roosting in the country's high-elevation, oyamel fir forests-the winter home to 99 percent of North America's monarch population. The scientists estimate that in the winter of 2014 to 2015, these forests housed 56.6 million monarchs-up 69 percent from the previous year's survey, when the insects' numbers fell to historic lows. In California, where the remainder of the continent's monarchs overwinter, volunteers counted 234,732 butterflies at 185 sites, about the same number as last year.

While the news from Mexico was welcome, the increase "does not mean the monarch butterfly has recovered," says Chip Taylor, director of the nonprofit Monarch Watch and a biologist at the University of Kansas. The latest count remains one of the lowest ever recorded, he notes, "and even if its numbers doubled or tripled, North America's monarch population remains very small and very vulnerable."

According to scientists, the continent's monarch population has declined by more than 80 percent from its average during the past two decades-and by more than 90 percent from its peak of nearly one billion butterflies in the mid-1990s. With modest numbers of non-migratory monarchs ranging south to Peru, and small, introduced populations established in locations around the world, the species Danaus plexippus most likely will survive. But "we very well may lose the spectacular phenomena of monarch migration and overwintering," says Lincoln Brower, a Sweet Briar College biologist who has studied the butterflies since the 1950s.

Migratory Marvels
North America's monarch migration-up to 3,000 miles round-trip-and large winter aggregations make up one of the greatest natural history spectacles on Earth. While many bird species undertake longer seasonal movements, monarchs are different because their migration takes place over several generations. Butterflies flying to Mexico in fall are the great-grandchildren of insects that departed the previous spring. These individuals have never seen their winter habitat-and how they find their way remains largely a mystery.

Scientists have known for several years that monarchs use a sun compass, with receptors located in their antennae, to orient southward in fall. Last summer, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported in Nature Communications that the insects also possess a magnetic compass, explaining how they can still travel south on overcast days. "But none of this tells us how monarchs that have never been to Mexico navigate to the same grove of trees-sometimes the same trees-their ancestors did generations before," Brower says. If and when that mystery is solved, he adds, "It will be a great scientific discovery."

Whether bound for Mexico (most butterflies east of the Rocky Mountains) or California (most to the west), monarchs must winter in habitats that are warm enough to prevent freezing but not so warm they begin to reproduce and burn up fat reserves needed to migrate in spring.

Brower discovered just how picky the butterflies are in the early 2000s when he and his colleagues conducted a series of aerial searches for Mexican monarch colonies that had not yet been identified. Though the researchers surveyed more than 155 square miles of forest that appeared to be suitable habitat (based on elevation and tree cover), they found no sign of the butterflies outside a small number of sites scientists discovered in the 1970s. "The extraordinary site fidelity and extreme localization of colonies within such a small portion of available habitat underscore the utter urgency of protecting the forests," they wrote in American Entomologist.

Transborder Threats

Conservationists concerned about monarchs focused initially on protecting these Mexican forests, where large-scale, illegal logging was destroying or degrading vast expanses of habitat. Thanks to such efforts, "the Mexican authorities began effectively enforcing regulations to protect monarch reserves about seven years ago," says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and co-chair of the Monarch Joint Venture, a partnership of more than 20 U.S. federal and state agencies, universities and nongovernmental organizations, including the National Wildlife Federation. "Enforcement, along with economic support for local people, has mostly curtailed large-scale logging." Small-scale tree removal-which can alter the microclimate monarchs need-remains a problem, he adds.

Now a more formidable threat has emerged on the U.S. side of the border: the destruction of habitat across the butterflies' breeding range, particularly milkweed loss in the Midwest. Host plants for monarchs, milkweeds are the only plants the butterflies' caterpillars can eat (a caterpillar feeds on common milkweed, above). Moreover, "the majority of the world's monarchs are produced by milkweeds in the Corn Belt," says University of Minnesota biologist Karen Oberhauser, co-chair of the Monarch Joint Venture. She and Iowa State University biologist John Pleasants estimated that more than 60 percent of the region's milkweeds were lost between 1999 and 2012. During the same period, Oberhauser says, the Midwest produced 88 percent fewer monarch butterflies than it did before 1999.

Milkweeds Lost

Milkweeds-along with the nectar plants monarchs need to fuel migration-have fallen prey to changes in midwestern farming practices. The most detrimental has been development and increased planting of corn and soybeans genetically engineered to survive applications of the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup. The near ubiquitous use of "Roundup Ready" crops today allows farmers to apply the herbicide widely, killing off milkweed and other native plants that once thrived between crop rows and along the edges of millions of acres of agricultural land.

Milkweed losses also have been driven by the massive conversion of grasslands, rangelands and former conservation reserves to monocultures of corn and soybeans-a change propelled in large part by federal pressure to develop ethanol as an alternative fuel. Taylor reports that since 2007, farmers have plowed under more than 24 million acres of new cropland, an area about the size of Indiana. "In much of the Corn Belt, farming is now from road to road, with little habitat for any form of wildlife remaining," he says.

As monarch populations plummet, "other threats are becoming proportionally more significant," Oberhauser says. She cites disease, predation in the butterflies' winter roosts, insecticide use and invasion by nonnative plants related to milkweeds. Monarchs lay eggs on these plants, called swallow-worts, but their caterpillars cannot eat the leaves and die.

Monarchs also have been hit hard in recent years by extreme weather events such as droughts, storms, heat waves and unusually cold or wet springs that delay reproduction-events likely to become more frequent with climate change. Some studies suggest that by the end of this century, global warming may eliminate forests within the insects' Mexican reserves. Even without such losses, overwintering butterflies are constantly at risk from bad weather. A single storm in 2002 killed an estimated 500 million monarchs-eight times more butterflies than survive in North America today.

Butterfly Heroes
Known to most Americans since grade-school biology, monarchs are iconic insects whose popularity may help save them. Indeed, an unprecedented effort to bring back the butterflies began in February 2014, when President Barack Obama met with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Toluca, Mexico. One result of their "Three Amigos" summit was creation of a three-nation working group on monarch butterflies. Two months later, the White House convened a meeting of scientists and conservationists to discuss declining pollinators, focusing on bees and monarchs. "I never expected that a President of the United States would draw attention to this problem," says Sarina Jepsen, endangered species program director for the Xerces Society, one of 60 groups represented at the meeting.

Last June, the White House went one step further, issuing a memorandum that calls for creation of a federal strategy to protect pollinators. Specifically, the president directed the heads of more than a dozen government agencies to take action on behalf of bees, monarchs and other pollinators-moves with considerable conservation potential given that the government owns hundreds of millions of acres ranging from national parks, forests and wildlife refuges to rights-of-way along federal highways, pipelines and power lines.

Monarch Task Force
One task force, led by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, focuses on monarchs, and the service is reviewing a petition to list the butterfly as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, dozens of nongovernmental groups-including NWF-are mobilizing members and partners nationwide to restore milkweed and native nectar-plant habitat for monarchs.

Will such efforts be enough? "The scale of habitat loss is so great that we've only just begun," Jepsen admits. According to Taylor, one million acres of milkweed must be planted annually simply to keep pace with new losses. Creating all the habitat monarchs need, he adds, "requires the largest habitat-restoration program ever attempted in the world." Still, he and other scientists believe it is doable-with sufficient will, collaboration and long-term financial commitment. "There is no reason to lose the monarch migration," Taylor says.

How You Can Help Monarch Butterflies
Purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and bee balm in an Iowa yard (above) offer a feast of native nectar for monarch butterflies. "As monarchs lose more and more habitat on agricultural lands, backyards have become increasingly important," says Xerces Society Endangered Species Program Director Sarina Jepsen. Here's how gardeners can help in a new, nationwide monarch-recovery effort:

Plant milkweeds native to your region. Because they coevolved with your region's wildlife, native milkweeds are best. Recent research shows that one popular nonnative-tropical milkweed-may even harm monarchs in the Southeast. That's because, unlike indigenous species, tropical milkweed foliage does not die back in areas that stay warm during winter, encouraging nonmigratory monarchs to breed year-round and causing the buildup of a debilitating parasite, called OE, that caterpillars ingest when eating the leaves. Sources of native milkweeds include Monarch Watch's Milkweed Market and the Xerces Society's Milkweed Seed Finder.

Cultivate native nectar plants. Nectar sources are especially important during spring and fall when monarchs migrate and need to fuel their flights, which can reach 2,000 miles during fall. Sources for native nectar plants include the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's Native Plant Database and regional planting guides published by the Pollinator Partnership.

Avoid pesticides. In particular, steer clear of systemic insecticides such as neonicotinoids. These are taken up by plants' vascular systems, leaving caterpillars and butterflies that feed on leaves, nectar and pollen exposed to the poison long after it has been applied. A new study provides evidence that milkweed leaves treated with one neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid, kill monarch caterpillars that eat them.

Participate in citizen science. Biologists need volunteers to help study monarchs. Monarch Watch participants tag migrating butterflies (right). In the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, you can check milkweed for eggs and larvae. With Journey North, volunteers report monarch sightings, and Monarch Health participants test butterflies for OE parasites. Broad participation in these continent-wide programs reflects public support that "has really given me hope," says University of Minnesota biologist and Monarch Larva Monitoring Project founder Karen Oberhauser.

NWF Priority: Push for Pollinators
As part of a larger effort to protect pollinators, NWF and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed an agreement in February calling on citizens to help monarchs by cultivating milkweed and native nectar plants. Unlike with many environmental crises, "we don't have to wait for someone else to take action," says NWF President Collin O'Mara. Adds Mary Phillips of the Federation's Garden for Wildlife™ program: "With some 400,000 participants, we offer tremendous potential to create new monarch habitat nationwide." To find out more-and to learn how NWF affiliates are helping pollinators-visit www.nwf.org/pollinators.

May is Garden for Wildlife Month

Become an NWF Wildlife Gardener and sign up for our Garden for Wildlife™ newsletter. It's free and you will receive great gardening tips and learn how to certify your yard as a Certified Wildlife Habitat® site or your community as part of NWF's Community Wildlife Habitat® program.

Senior Editor Laura Tangley is a butterfly-friendly wildlife gardener.

More from National Wildlife magazine and NWF

Be a Butterfly Hero
Wildlife Gardening: Catering to Butterfly Royalty
Western Monarchs: Why 1 Percent Matters
Conservation: Six Ways to Save Monarchs
Gardening: Twelve Native Milkweeds for Monarchs

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The fight to bring back North America's dwindling migratory monarchs AFTER PASSING THE WINTER hunkered down on evergreens in central Mexico or coastal California, monarch butterflies are on the move again this spring.

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Practice and learn new vocab words with this FUN and FREE game. Climb mountains, fight beasts, and answer hundreds of vocab questions.

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Here's a fun, free, and awesome online activity about Idioms. Read the examples, answer the questions, share your results! Did I mention it's free?

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Greetings scientists! Your journey through the sciences will allow you to experience many strange phenomena and meet some even stranger people. One of those strange people might just be Red Eye Rick.

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Reading Comprehension Quiz

How might playing chess be good for people? Refer to the text in your answer.

Why might blitz chess be more challenging to play than regular chess? Use text to support your answer.

How have computer chess programs changed over time? Use the text in your answer.

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Here's a fun, free, and awesome online activity about Chess. Read the story, take the test, share your results! Did I mention it's free?

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The Poem - Twas The Night Before Christmas

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Read our online version of Twas the Night Before Christmas (A Visit from St. Nicholas) by Clement C. Moore and find out how we’re celebrating its 200th anniversary.

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Click on the pictures below to learn more about soybeans.

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You've just finished your Thanksgiving feast and it's time for dessert...but a pie has gone missing! Oh no! All of your friends and family are bewildered - none of them took the pie.

You realize that one of the other foods must have been the Thanksgiving thief and that there are clues scattered around the table. Using your handy dandy notebook, can you deduce the who, what, when, where, and how of this mystery so that everybody can enjoy Thanksgiving? Each clue will give you hints as to what you can eliminate, which will lead you to the final lock. This lock is the key to cracking the case for good!

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Ms. Yeh's Breakouts - The Case of the Pilfered Pie

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You've just finished your Thanksgiving feast and it's time for dessert...but a pie has gone missing! Oh no! All of your friends and family are bewildered - none of them took the pie. You realize that one of the other foods must have been the Thanksgiving thief and that there are clues scattered around the table.

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Battle for Butterflies

The fight to bring back North America's dwindling migratory monarchs

AFTER PASSING THE WINTER hunkered down on evergreens in central Mexico or coastal California, monarch butterflies are on the move again this spring. Fluttering 25 to 30 miles a day, the insects are headed north and east toward breeding grounds that by mid-summer will stretch from coast to coast across the United States and as far north as southern Canada.

Conservationists hope gardeners will spot more of the beloved orange-and-black butterflies in their yards this year than last. As this issue went to press in February, Mexican researchers had just announced results of their annual survey of monarchs roosting in the country's high-elevation, oyamel fir forests-the winter home to 99 percent of North America's monarch population. The scientists estimate that in the winter of 2014 to 2015, these forests housed 56.6 million monarchs-up 69 percent from the previous year's survey, when the insects' numbers fell to historic lows. In California, where the remainder of the continent's monarchs overwinter, volunteers counted 234,732 butterflies at 185 sites, about the same number as last year.

While the news from Mexico was welcome, the increase "does not mean the monarch butterfly has recovered," says Chip Taylor, director of the nonprofit Monarch Watch and a biologist at the University of Kansas. The latest count remains one of the lowest ever recorded, he notes, "and even if its numbers doubled or tripled, North America's monarch population remains very small and very vulnerable."

According to scientists, the continent's monarch population has declined by more than 80 percent from its average during the past two decades-and by more than 90 percent from its peak of nearly one billion butterflies in the mid-1990s. With modest numbers of non-migratory monarchs ranging south to Peru, and small, introduced populations established in locations around the world, the species Danaus plexippus most likely will survive. But "we very well may lose the spectacular phenomena of monarch migration and overwintering," says Lincoln Brower, a Sweet Briar College biologist who has studied the butterflies since the 1950s.

Migratory Marvels
North America's monarch migration-up to 3,000 miles round-trip-and large winter aggregations make up one of the greatest natural history spectacles on Earth. While many bird species undertake longer seasonal movements, monarchs are different because their migration takes place over several generations. Butterflies flying to Mexico in fall are the great-grandchildren of insects that departed the previous spring. These individuals have never seen their winter habitat-and how they find their way remains largely a mystery.

Scientists have known for several years that monarchs use a sun compass, with receptors located in their antennae, to orient southward in fall. Last summer, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported in Nature Communications that the insects also possess a magnetic compass, explaining how they can still travel south on overcast days. "But none of this tells us how monarchs that have never been to Mexico navigate to the same grove of trees-sometimes the same trees-their ancestors did generations before," Brower says. If and when that mystery is solved, he adds, "It will be a great scientific discovery."

Whether bound for Mexico (most butterflies east of the Rocky Mountains) or California (most to the west), monarchs must winter in habitats that are warm enough to prevent freezing but not so warm they begin to reproduce and burn up fat reserves needed to migrate in spring.

Brower discovered just how picky the butterflies are in the early 2000s when he and his colleagues conducted a series of aerial searches for Mexican monarch colonies that had not yet been identified. Though the researchers surveyed more than 155 square miles of forest that appeared to be suitable habitat (based on elevation and tree cover), they found no sign of the butterflies outside a small number of sites scientists discovered in the 1970s. "The extraordinary site fidelity and extreme localization of colonies within such a small portion of available habitat underscore the utter urgency of protecting the forests," they wrote in American Entomologist.

Transborder Threats

Conservationists concerned about monarchs focused initially on protecting these Mexican forests, where large-scale, illegal logging was destroying or degrading vast expanses of habitat. Thanks to such efforts, "the Mexican authorities began effectively enforcing regulations to protect monarch reserves about seven years ago," says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and co-chair of the Monarch Joint Venture, a partnership of more than 20 U.S. federal and state agencies, universities and nongovernmental organizations, including the National Wildlife Federation. "Enforcement, along with economic support for local people, has mostly curtailed large-scale logging." Small-scale tree removal-which can alter the microclimate monarchs need-remains a problem, he adds.

Now a more formidable threat has emerged on the U.S. side of the border: the destruction of habitat across the butterflies' breeding range, particularly milkweed loss in the Midwest. Host plants for monarchs, milkweeds are the only plants the butterflies' caterpillars can eat (a caterpillar feeds on common milkweed, above). Moreover, "the majority of the world's monarchs are produced by milkweeds in the Corn Belt," says University of Minnesota biologist Karen Oberhauser, co-chair of the Monarch Joint Venture. She and Iowa State University biologist John Pleasants estimated that more than 60 percent of the region's milkweeds were lost between 1999 and 2012. During the same period, Oberhauser says, the Midwest produced 88 percent fewer monarch butterflies than it did before 1999.

Milkweeds Lost

Milkweeds-along with the nectar plants monarchs need to fuel migration-have fallen prey to changes in midwestern farming practices. The most detrimental has been development and increased planting of corn and soybeans genetically engineered to survive applications of the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup. The near ubiquitous use of "Roundup Ready" crops today allows farmers to apply the herbicide widely, killing off milkweed and other native plants that once thrived between crop rows and along the edges of millions of acres of agricultural land.

Milkweed losses also have been driven by the massive conversion of grasslands, rangelands and former conservation reserves to monocultures of corn and soybeans-a change propelled in large part by federal pressure to develop ethanol as an alternative fuel. Taylor reports that since 2007, farmers have plowed under more than 24 million acres of new cropland, an area about the size of Indiana. "In much of the Corn Belt, farming is now from road to road, with little habitat for any form of wildlife remaining," he says.

As monarch populations plummet, "other threats are becoming proportionally more significant," Oberhauser says. She cites disease, predation in the butterflies' winter roosts, insecticide use and invasion by nonnative plants related to milkweeds. Monarchs lay eggs on these plants, called swallow-worts, but their caterpillars cannot eat the leaves and die.

Monarchs also have been hit hard in recent years by extreme weather events such as droughts, storms, heat waves and unusually cold or wet springs that delay reproduction-events likely to become more frequent with climate change. Some studies suggest that by the end of this century, global warming may eliminate forests within the insects' Mexican reserves. Even without such losses, overwintering butterflies are constantly at risk from bad weather. A single storm in 2002 killed an estimated 500 million monarchs-eight times more butterflies than survive in North America today.

Butterfly Heroes
Known to most Americans since grade-school biology, monarchs are iconic insects whose popularity may help save them. Indeed, an unprecedented effort to bring back the butterflies began in February 2014, when President Barack Obama met with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Toluca, Mexico. One result of their "Three Amigos" summit was creation of a three-nation working group on monarch butterflies. Two months later, the White House convened a meeting of scientists and conservationists to discuss declining pollinators, focusing on bees and monarchs. "I never expected that a President of the United States would draw attention to this problem," says Sarina Jepsen, endangered species program director for the Xerces Society, one of 60 groups represented at the meeting.

Last June, the White House went one step further, issuing a memorandum that calls for creation of a federal strategy to protect pollinators. Specifically, the president directed the heads of more than a dozen government agencies to take action on behalf of bees, monarchs and other pollinators-moves with considerable conservation potential given that the government owns hundreds of millions of acres ranging from national parks, forests and wildlife refuges to rights-of-way along federal highways, pipelines and power lines.

Monarch Task Force
One task force, led by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, focuses on monarchs, and the service is reviewing a petition to list the butterfly as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, dozens of nongovernmental groups-including NWF-are mobilizing members and partners nationwide to restore milkweed and native nectar-plant habitat for monarchs.

Will such efforts be enough? "The scale of habitat loss is so great that we've only just begun," Jepsen admits. According to Taylor, one million acres of milkweed must be planted annually simply to keep pace with new losses. Creating all the habitat monarchs need, he adds, "requires the largest habitat-restoration program ever attempted in the world." Still, he and other scientists believe it is doable-with sufficient will, collaboration and long-term financial commitment. "There is no reason to lose the monarch migration," Taylor says.

How You Can Help Monarch Butterflies
Purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and bee balm in an Iowa yard (above) offer a feast of native nectar for monarch butterflies. "As monarchs lose more and more habitat on agricultural lands, backyards have become increasingly important," says Xerces Society Endangered Species Program Director Sarina Jepsen. Here's how gardeners can help in a new, nationwide monarch-recovery effort:

Plant milkweeds native to your region. Because they coevolved with your region's wildlife, native milkweeds are best. Recent research shows that one popular nonnative-tropical milkweed-may even harm monarchs in the Southeast. That's because, unlike indigenous species, tropical milkweed foliage does not die back in areas that stay warm during winter, encouraging nonmigratory monarchs to breed year-round and causing the buildup of a debilitating parasite, called OE, that caterpillars ingest when eating the leaves. Sources of native milkweeds include Monarch Watch's Milkweed Market and the Xerces Society's Milkweed Seed Finder.

Cultivate native nectar plants. Nectar sources are especially important during spring and fall when monarchs migrate and need to fuel their flights, which can reach 2,000 miles during fall. Sources for native nectar plants include the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's Native Plant Database and regional planting guides published by the Pollinator Partnership.

Avoid pesticides. In particular, steer clear of systemic insecticides such as neonicotinoids. These are taken up by plants' vascular systems, leaving caterpillars and butterflies that feed on leaves, nectar and pollen exposed to the poison long after it has been applied. A new study provides evidence that milkweed leaves treated with one neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid, kill monarch caterpillars that eat them.

Participate in citizen science. Biologists need volunteers to help study monarchs. Monarch Watch participants tag migrating butterflies (right). In the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, you can check milkweed for eggs and larvae. With Journey North, volunteers report monarch sightings, and Monarch Health participants test butterflies for OE parasites. Broad participation in these continent-wide programs reflects public support that "has really given me hope," says University of Minnesota biologist and Monarch Larva Monitoring Project founder Karen Oberhauser.

NWF Priority: Push for Pollinators
As part of a larger effort to protect pollinators, NWF and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed an agreement in February calling on citizens to help monarchs by cultivating milkweed and native nectar plants. Unlike with many environmental crises, "we don't have to wait for someone else to take action," says NWF President Collin O'Mara. Adds Mary Phillips of the Federation's Garden for Wildlife™ program: "With some 400,000 participants, we offer tremendous potential to create new monarch habitat nationwide." To find out more-and to learn how NWF affiliates are helping pollinators-visit www.nwf.org/pollinators.

May is Garden for Wildlife Month

Become an NWF Wildlife Gardener and sign up for our Garden for Wildlife™ newsletter. It's free and you will receive great gardening tips and learn how to certify your yard as a Certified Wildlife Habitat® site or your community as part of NWF's Community Wildlife Habitat® program.

Senior Editor Laura Tangley is a butterfly-friendly wildlife gardener.

More from National Wildlife magazine and NWF

Be a Butterfly Hero
Wildlife Gardening: Catering to Butterfly Royalty
Western Monarchs: Why 1 Percent Matters
Conservation: Six Ways to Save Monarchs
Gardening: Twelve Native Milkweeds for Monarchs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The fight to bring back North America's dwindling migratory monarchs AFTER PASSING THE WINTER hunkered down on evergreens in central Mexico or coastal California, monarch butterflies are on the move again this spring.

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What is the difference: weather & climate

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What is the difference: weather & climate

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Visit Oregon | Oregon Travel & Vacation Guide

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The Oregon Trail Game Online | Visit Oregon

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Test your geography knowledge: USA: state capitals quiz

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USA Geography quiz geography quiz - just click on the map to answer the questions about the capital cities in USA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Based on the book of Daniel Find royalty free Christian Drama skits at my Fools for Christ website at http://foolsforchrist.net. Find interactive Bible games at http://guest.portaportal.com/applebeebible

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Based on the book of Daniel Find royalty free Christian Drama skits at my Fools for Christ website at http://foolsforchrist.net. Find interactive Bible games at http://guest.portaportal.com/applebeebible

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How To Draw with Mark Kistler: Foreshortened Flapping Flags

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Learn to recognise different circuit symbols with this Year 6 Bitesize Science guide.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Surviving Winter: Animal Adaptation Strategies | Mountain Lake Journal | PBS LearningMedia

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Join naturalist Mark Fraser on a nature walk to see how the animals of the Adirondack Park in upstate New York prepare for the tough winter ahead and explore how climate change could impact these survival strategies.

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Copy of [B] Digital Inquiry Jr: What weather observations can be measured & recorded?

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[B] Digital Inquiry Jr: What are the planets in order from the Sun?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I first meet people, most are surprised to discover that I am a palaeontologist. A palaeontologist is someone who studies fossils. Palaeontologists are a somewhat rare species of professional, and especially within the Christian community. Many falsely believe that fossils and the fossil record are evidence that runs counter to the biblical narrative of Creation and a short history of Earth and a worldwide Flood, because they point to an evolutionary history of millions of years.

There are two reasons given for a long history of life on Earth. First, various groups of organisms appear in an ascending order of complexity within the geological strata (or layers of rock), with "simpler" organisms occurring in lower strata and more "complex" organisms in higher strata. This appears to contradict the biblical record of Creation. Second, some dating techniques give long ages for those strata in the order of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years. So the argument is made that the earth and fossils must be cast as much older than the few thousand years of the biblical chronology.

Fossils record organisms-plants, animals and microorganisms-that lived in the past and are now preserved in the rocks. Common fossils are body parts like bones of animals, mollusc shells, exoskeletons of marine and terrestrial animals, wood and leaves of plants, and microorganisms such as diatoms (algae). But there are more types of fossils than these preserved remains of formerly living things. There are also trace fossils, like trackways and burrows that record the activities of organisms.

Studying fossils gives us information about organisms of the past-where they lived and how they behaved. The work of a palaeontologist is to discern, interpret and weigh the evidence in a process similar to that of a detective looking to solve a murder. The questions we ask include: What are they? How did they die? When did they die? How were they buried and preserved? As a Christian and Bible believer, I find that my biblical worldview allows more insight-more angles of enquiry, in detective speak-than more inhibited enquirers and can come up with answers that account for the facts and biblical view of a world that is much younger than scientific orthodoxy that views these fossils as evidence of evolution allows for.

So with this in mind, let's consider some aspects of the fossil record and evaluate if fossils can be reasonably interpreted in a way compatible with the biblical record of a short earth age.

To begin, come with me to a motor museum. As we walk the halls, we view more advanced models of the 1920s, 1930s, and so on up to the highly complex cars of the twenty-first century, with their electronic gear shifting, anti-lock braking systems, and Bluetooth communication devices. Note, besides an increase in complexity, we also find an increase in diversityalong with specialisation -passenger, cargo carrying, racing etc-a gradual evolution of automobiles from less complex, diverse and specialised into diverse highly complex engineering marvels over time. We might even pinpoint the common "ancestor" of all autos, though there would be some hot discussion as to where it was developed. The first autos were made in France and Germany, later in the United States and Britain, Italy, Russia, Spain, Japan and Korea. That means that the first car was made in one country, then production began in other geographic places, all using similar ideas but developing diverse designs, technologies and exclusive components.

Now, let's compare that with the fossil record. We begin at the layers from the Cambrian period-the lowest geological strata containing abundant fossils and considered among the "oldest" fossils of many organisms. Palaeontologists call the appearance of diverse fossils that are not present in lower rocks the Cambrian Explosion. According to Simon Conway Morris' Darwin's Dilemma: The Realities of the Cambrian 'Explosion', most major forms of animal life we're familiar with appear suddenly in those strata, fully formed, highly specialised and diversified. In The Ecology of the Cambrian Radiation, Andrey Zhuravlev states the Cambrian fossils also appear simultaneously in multiple locations in the world in different ecosystems. But that is not what would be expected in a model of gradual appearance of life with increasing complexity and diversity over a long period. It's as if in the automobile museum, the room displaying the first automobile has 23 "firsts" instead of just one, and all of them already quite complex and diverse, and none clearly the model ancestor of the others. Moreover, those "firsts" would have appeared in multiple geographic places simultaneously. If this were the case in the museum, we would be tempted to think that the belief that automobiles were invented in Western Europe and not North America is wrong.

The biblical view of the creation of all life forms and a sudden burial that turned them into fossils during a global flood actually fits better with the sudden appearance of diverse fossils as apparent in the Cambrian Explosion. During the biblical Creation week, God created multiple groups of organisms (diversity), all of them very complex. According to Genesis 3, the environment Adam and Eve encountered outside Eden was rather different from the one inside the garden, suggesting that God had placed animals and plants in many parts of the world. Based on the type of sediment that makes up the Cambrian layer, the type of organisms and the trace fossils like burrows and trail marks, palaeontologists interpret the Cambrian fossils as representing fauna that lived on the bottom of ancient seas. This is compatible with a worldwide flood washing sedimentary rock into the pre-flood oceans and burying organisms living on the bottom.

Marine animals appear in the lower layers of the fossil record. Such include sponges, trilobites and other arthropods, molluscs and many kinds of sea worm among others. Those organisms are called invertebrates because they lack a backbone. Fossils of vertebrates (animals with a backbone) like fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals occur in layers above in a succession that-according to palaeontology-suggests a gradual appearance over many millions of years. However, a closer look at both the fossils and the characteristics of the layers where they are found suggests an interpretation that doesn't invoke millions of years may better explain how they were formed.

The different groups of vertebrate appear in succession but each group appears abruptly, not gradually. A gradual appearance would show intermediate forms between, for example, fish and amphibians, or reptiles and mammals, and between different groups of invertebrates. Also, the different groups of plants appear without gradual variation or connections among them. Sudden appearance is better explained in the biblical model of Creation in which multiple forms of animals and plants were created "according to their kind," without intermediate or transitional forms.

Looking at media from the present-day, television documentaries, academia and textbooks all regularly assert that fossil formation takes millions of years. In fact, the opposite must be true in order for fossils to even exist. Three conditions are needed for fossil formation: first, the possession of hard parts (although there are exceptional cases of soft tissue preservation), second, rapid burial in sediment, and third, mineral exchange within the sediment facilitated by percolating water. Given those conditions, fossilisation may occur in a span of time between a few hours and a few years, but however long it takes must be less than the time that an organism's body lasts after death. Thus, millions of animals and plants could have been buried during the worldwide Genesis flood and rapidly fossilised in the wet sediment.

In the past two decades, there have been numerous reports of soft tissue occurring in fossilised bones and other fossils, many of them thought to be millions of years old.This is puzzling because soft tissue doesn't last long after an organism dies. Some resistant organic molecules, like collagen, may last a few hundred or even a thousand years under ideal conditions, but not 65 million years, as have blood vessels and cells found in some dinosaur bones, some even with preserved elasticity and colour. A better explanation is that those fossils are not that old, as the biblical chronology implies.

Granted, certain aspects of the geological record are problematic for a short chronology, such as the biblical Creation and flood narrative. For example, radiometric dating suggests that rocks associated with fossils are millions of years old. Coral reefs and other biological constructions that require thousands of years to form occur at various levels in the geological column, and they are hard to interpret in a worldwide flood model.

Both fossils and the rocks give a dual set of features that lead to opposite interpretation: hundreds of millions of years during which various groups of organisms appear successively, versus thousands of years at the beginning of which different groups of organisms were created that were later buried during the great flood of the Bible. There are problems with a short-age chronology, but the long-age chronology also faces significant drawbacks. No-one has all the answers, but the biblical model of Creation and the Flood is not incompatible with many features observed in the geological and fossil record. In fact, many features suggest the biblical model is superior to other models.
Raul Esperante is a research professor at the Geoscience Research Institute. He has led palaeontology research teams in the United States, Peru, Bolivia and Spain.

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The fossil record and the Bible - Signs of the Times

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Flora and fauna artifacts from beneath the earth's surface are often used as arguments for the theory of evolution. Palaeontologist Raul Esperante explains how they actually support the idea of Creation.

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