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

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/butterflies-are-in-dramatic-decline-across-north-america-a-close-look-at-the-western-monarch-shows-why-180988582/

57•1659447091•1h ago

Comments

tastyfreeze•57m 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.

micromacrofoot•37m ago

it is not love, we need to make it unprofitable

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

fooqux•11m 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. :/

ceejayoz•25m 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•23m 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.

downboots•21m ago

We'll hopefully look back at these like we now see asbestos. For all our scientific advancement it seems myopic.

nomel•2m 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.

tabbytown•55m 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.

kleton•43m 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

fooqux•18m ago

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

jihadjihad•7m 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•5m 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+...

1659447091•14m 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•5m 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)

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