Wildlife

Monarch Refuge Losses

Storms earlier this year toppled more than a hundred acres of forest in central Mexico, where migrating monarch butterflies spend each winter. Late reports say the severe weather was accompanied by rain, cold and high winds, which killed more than 7 percent of the wintering butterflies. “Never had we observed such a combination of high winds, rain and freezing temperatures,” monarch expert Lincoln Brower said of the storms, which hit Michoacán’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve on March 8 and 9.

‘Mosquitornado’

Hollywood has envisioned the implausible phenomenon of spinning columns of bloodthirsty sharks in recent years, but tornadoes of bloodsucking mosquitoes were actually observed and photographed near Russia’s central Ural Mountains. The photographer who shot a video of several “mosquito tornadoes” in Yekaterinburg on Aug. 13 said each column contained millions of the insects. A single mosquito tornado was photographed in Portugal during the spring of 2014.