Does GMO maize pollen kill monarch butterflies?
In 1999 a scientist at Cornell University in the United States published the results of an experiment demonstrating that the caterpillars of monarch butterflies could die if forced in a laboratory to eat milkweed coated with pollen from GMO maize. This widely publicized study raised fears that the drifting pollen from large scale plantings of GMO maize might kill valuable “non-target” insects, and thus reduce biodiversity. In response to this concern, subsequent studies were undertaken by six independent research teams in the United States to examine closely the impacts of GMO maize pollen on non-target species under actual field conditions, rather than in a laboratory. In 2001 the results of these follow-up studies were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. All the studies found that under field conditions GMO maize pollen posed a “negligible” risk to monarch butterfly larvae. This was because the amount of pollen likely to be consumed
