The death rate of purple milkweed butterflies during their annual migration has dropped substantially since highway authorities adopted preservation measures on one of the country’s two main freeways in 2007, a National Expressway Bureau official said on Friday.
The bureau took a number of measures between late March and early April 2007 to protect the milkweed butterflies over the past two years. The period of time sees the colorful insects pass over a section of Freeway No. 3 to reach their breeding ground in the north after wintering in the south.
In addition to using protective nets and ultra-violet lights to aid the migrating butterflies, the bureau has closed one north-bound lane of the freeway at some points and restricted the speed of vehicles to avoid hitting the insects.
A field survey by professor Yang Ping-shih (楊平世) of National Taiwan University has shown that the ratio of butterflies killed while flying over the freeway declined from 3 percent in 2007 to 0.3 percent last year.
Bureau Director Lee Tai-ming (李泰明) said the measures would be expanded this year.
Taiwan would benefit from more integrated military strategies and deployments if the US and its allies treat the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea as a “single theater of operations,” a Taiwanese military expert said yesterday. Shen Ming-shih (沈明室), a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said he made the assessment after two Japanese military experts warned of emerging threats from China based on a drill conducted this month by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theater Command. Japan Institute for National Fundamentals researcher Maki Nakagawa said the drill differed from the
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