The time is almost here for monarch butterflies to make their epic 2,000 mile journey to their winter stomping grounds in Mexico, but the migration might not be as impressive this year.
"It's a little too early to tell, but there's a lot of concern that the Monarch numbers are going to be very low this year," Mark Garland, a member of the Cape May Monarch Monitoring Project, told NBC 40.
The peak of the monarch's migration season will take place later this month, until then the exact numbers will be hard to predict.
"With female Monarchs laying 200 or more eggs in their lives, the population can come back quite quickly," Garland said. "And we've seen, after very low years within one or two years later, the population can come back up very well. The question is, is there a minimum number of monarchs that if the population drops that low, they won't be able to rebound?"
Monarchs have been spotted fluttering through Minnesota, but scientists still believe the migration numbers will be low this year, MPR News reported.
Last year, Mexico saw the lowest number of hibernating butterflies in 20 years, USA Today reported. Twenty years ago the monarchs covered 45 acres of their winter resting grounds, last year they only spread out over about three acres.
The large decline in the monarch's population could be related to the wiping out of milkweed, which is the only place the butterflies will lay their eggs.
"Many people know milkweed, and many people like it," Travis Brady, the education director at the Greenburgh Nature Center, told USA Today. "And a lot of people actively try to destroy it. The health of the monarch population is solely dependent on the milkweed plant."
Milkweed populations declined by 50 percent between the years of 1999 and 2010, possibly because of logging, agricultural practices, and natural phenomena, the Star Tribune reported.
