Many animals are endangered because of LOSS OF HABITAT. So, what does loss of habitat mean? All animals need four things to survive—food, water, shelter and space. You may live in the city or in the country, in a house or in an apartment, but you have shelter, space and a way to get food and water. Imagine suddenly you have been put on a boat in the middle of the ocean. The ocean is pretty big, so you have lots of space. There are different fish and creatures that live in the ocean you can eat, if you can figure out a way to catch them. However, your boat probably wouldn’t be a very good shelter if it stormed. And the water in the ocean contains too much salt for you to be able to drink it. You probably would not survive for long unless you landed in a place where you could find or make these things.

This same kind of thing happens with animals. When people cut down forests, they may take away an animal’s shelter and space. If people pollute rivers and lakes, the animals that live there will not have safe water. If most of one kind of animal dies, then another animal that relies on the first animal for food may also die if it can’t find something else it can eat.

The Karner blue butterfly is an example of an animal that has become an endangered species because of loss of habitat. When this insect is a larva, or caterpillar, the only thing it will eat is the leaves of a plant called wild lupine. This plant only grows in certain places like dry, open woods with sandy soil. When people clear this certain kind of land to build more roads or houses or buildings, there is no place for the wild lupine to grow. Without wild lupine there can be no Karner blue butterflies.

At one point there were no longer any Karner blue butterflies in Ohio. In 1998 the species was reintroduced to Ohio by taking butterflies from southern Michigan and placing them in a protected habitat at Kitty Todd State Nature Preserve in Lucas County.