Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude
This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder.  All probably caused by overuse of insecticides.Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing.  There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not will fall even farther, with knock-on impact elsewhere.One wonders how much of a boy-who-cried-wolf effect we might be seeing.  Alarmism gets tiresome, so it's important to ring the alarm about the most urgent problems first.  The insect apocalypse -if it is real, which I've a feeling it very much is- is probably a problem we can ameliorate quickly once we decide to, and it will worsen quickly if we don't.  But climate change gets all the attention and sucks the oxygen out of the room.