Butterflies are in decline across North America, a look at the Western Monarch

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11659447091 about 4 hours ago 29 commentsRead Article on smithsonianmag.com

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shoobiedoo•about 2 hours ago

I'll never forget my first week working housing demolition in the Japanese countryside a few years ago. We were outside tearing down an old house, when I saw what I thought were bats. In broad daylight. But they were moving slowly... and I could see their wings beating. Holy crap, those are butterflies. Huge, stunningly beautiful, butterflies. And not just one or two, but many of them. When I was able to get a bit closer, they had dark purple lines and swirls, so not completely black. Housing demolition was a brutal job for many reasons but seeing that kind of thing made it more than worth it.

1659447091•about 3 hours ago

>> To better understand the stresses on these migratory species, scientists at Lighthouse Field are testing a new ultralight radio tag. Weighing less than a tenth of a gram, these tags, when placed on butterflies, can passively ping Bluetooth- and location-enabled cellphones of anyone nearby.

They put a solar powered tracking tag on a butterfly...

Then made an app and gamified it to get people to use their phones to collect, track, and upload the processed monarch migration data. It's like Pokemon Go meets SETI@Home for butterflies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8ZyJn6BENc

https://swmonarchs.org/ProjectMonarch.php

https://celltracktech.com/pages/project-monarch-press-releas...

JCBird1012•about 3 hours ago

A related project, but for birds - https://motus.org

Motus is a distrbuted network of ground stations for tracking birds and other species (like bats!) for research - they also use CTT tags for tracking (along with tags from another company called Lotek - https://www.lotek.com)

tastyfreeze•about 3 hours ago

It is my hope that humans can ditch their love affair with pesticides. This is just one example of the unintended impact of pesticides.

I have also found dying birds in my yard a few days after the neighbor sprayed their house perimeter for ants. No toxicology report but there was no sign of any physical damage.

nomel•about 3 hours ago

I had a salesman come to our place saying that a neighbor had spiders, so their whole backyard was treated! I laughed and shut the door.

downboots•about 3 hours ago

We'll hopefully look back at these like we now see asbestos. All our scientific advancement doesn't automatically cure myopia. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/how-...

ceejayoz•about 3 hours ago

We had a really bad year of mosquitos and got one of the spraying services in.

An hour later, monarch having a seizure on our porch. Oops. Never again.

_heimdall•about 3 hours ago

Yep, its clever how well chemical companies have sold us general poisons as being highly specific to certain plants/insects/animals.

That's not to say something can't work better on one particular type of biotic, but its still harmful to the others as well.

NewJazz•about 2 hours ago

Mosquito dunks and clear standing or pooling water.

acdha•44 minutes ago

This stopped working in the mid-Atlantic when invasive tiger mosquitoes arrived. They need like a bottle cap sized amount of water so even things like a flower can hold enough water for them to reproduce.

We’re using scented lures which have the right salt + lipid combo to attract mosquitoes. It helps but I still wish Nathan Myrvold had seriously developed that “photonic fence” product.

ceejayoz•about 2 hours ago

There’s a swamp near us and a bunch of neighbors.

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago

it is not love, we need to make it unprofitable

homeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures

fooqux•about 3 hours ago

> we need to make it unprofitable

Hard to do that when the very thing you're fighting against drastically lowers the cost of the product.

No, this is what regulation and laws are for. Too bad science and the like seem to be on the way out currently. :/

micromacrofoot•26 minutes ago

yeah exactly, it can be done but it's harder and more expensive (though likely not as expensive as meat industry subsidies)

nemo•about 1 hour ago

I live in Austin, we used to have huge butterfly migrations long ago, they were amazing to see, big swarms of Queen butterflies as well as Monarchs and other species. Last year's was heartbreaking to see, handfuls where there once were swarms, though I think that was driven by the drought. I have a pollinator garden and have been tracking butterflies in iNaturalist for a decade, last few years the numbers have been showing real decline. I think it's mostly habitat loss for my area.

tabbytown•about 3 hours ago

I planted narrow leaf milkweed in my yard for the first time this spring. This is the first time I've planted something with the intention of it being eaten.

fooqux•about 3 hours ago

I wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.

jihadjihad•about 3 hours ago

> Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.

It’s not too hard to find in the US. You could buy five pounds of seed [0] right now if you wanted to.

0: https://www.johnnyseeds.com/farm-seed/legumes/clovers/new-ze...

tmoertel•about 3 hours ago

Dutch white clover is easy and cheap to purchase, at least in the United States:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Dutch+white+clover+seed+for+...

https://www.ernstseed.com/product/white-clover-dutch/

dqv•about 2 hours ago

I thought about it, but it turns out the clover that people use for lawns isn't native, and I figured that if I'm doing the lawncare, I'm going to go as native as possible. I don't think our natives here in the US - trifolium reflexum and trifolium carolinianum - work very well as a "lawn" like that. I do have the carolinianum seeds that I want to grow in a container. Both are rare, so I want to help keep them in existence.

I'm looking into native sedges right now since they provide a lot of ecological benefit and are better-suited to growing in the soil conditions of my yard.

salynchnew•19 minutes ago

You can get alternative bulk mowable native lawn substitute seeds from the Thomas Payne Foundation.

kleton•about 3 hours ago

Gen X and Millenials don't share Boomers' obsession with green lawns, so it's a race against time, whether Boomers or lightning bugs will go extinct first

Octoth0rpe•about 2 hours ago

On the other hand, I don't think I know any millenials that don't have an extremely overbearing HoA that forbids anything other than a grass lawn.

pkaye•about 1 hour ago

I looked it up and a couple of states have laws against HOAs from forcing your to have a grass lawn. Alternatives can include native plants, drought tolerant plants, xeriscaping, vegetable gardens depending on state. The states I've found are California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Maryland, Nevada.

tempaccount5050•about 2 hours ago

Maybe not directly, but they definitely care about property value which gets you municipal codes requiring you to mow your lawn or get fined.

sholladay•about 2 hours ago

Stop planting butterfly bushes! It’s a trap. Instead, plant milkweed. Support their entire lifecycle.

The names of these plants ought to be changed.

jonah•9 minutes ago

You should only be planting native species whatever they are for your specific area.

Kaliboy•about 2 hours ago

I'm not American, grew up on a Caribbean island. When I was little milkweed was everywhere, including our yard. Consequently monarch butterflies were everywhere.

But we fought the milkweeds cause nobody wanted them in their yard cause before long it's all you had.

We won the war but we don't have as many monarch butterflies anymore.

Here it had nothing to do with pesticides, we just destroyed their lifecycle.

Rover222•about 1 hour ago

Pesticides... messing up everything from butterflies to human colon cells at the moment.