>> 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.
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)
Motus is also used for bats and insects! The butterfly project the parent linked to is using Motus: “ This year, new receivers have been added to Motus towers around the Southwest as well as special nodes to pick up their signals.”
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.
I visited the rainforest in Brazil (Iguazú Falls / Foz do Iguaçu) a few years ago and saw literally dozens of species of butterflies of every size and color. It was truly incredible. Not to mention the falls themselves and the rest of the flora and fauna. The rainforest is amazing!
Used to be like that between Myanmar and Laos when descending the Mekong from China to Thailand. These days you'd be lucky to see one: development on both sides, particularly clear-felling for rubber (the price of which has now crashed), has totally destroyed the biodiversity.
Everything's in decline these days. We lack the political will to solve some of these large scale problems. This confuses people, since we do actually have the technology to solve a lot of these problems. But it's a coordination problem. How do you motivate millions of people across 2-3 countries to care about one particular issue? It sounds simple on paper, but for most people "their cup is already full" of other people's pet causes.
They're maxed out, and there's a limit to how many causes they can 1) be convinced to care about and 2) how many causes they actually have the impulse control to keep strict about.
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.
Pesticides form the backbone of crop protection. Without them, we're looking at at least a 40% reduction in global yield, and much greater uncertainty in food supply chains (the oil shocks show how bad that can be). Pesticides per se are not the problem; synthetic broad-spectrum pesticides with many unintended effects are. They're often toxic to people and ecosystems, and resistance among pests and pathogens is increasing anyway, so their days are numbered to a degree. Biopesticides, which are generally safer and much more sustainable, offer a real solution to at least the safety issue.
I work on RNAi-based biopesticides (sprayed dsRNA) - non-GM, doesn't impact beneficial species, doesn't hang around in the environment, etc. Already ubiquitous in nature (and part of our diet). Peptide-based biopesticides are another approach that is going well. Both approaches are now commercialised by smaller players (e.g. for varroa mite control in bee hives by GreenLight), and not by the Bayer, Syngenta types.
Pesticides form the backbone of crop protection. Without them, we're looking at at least a 40% reduction in global yield
Such numbers might be ballpark correct, but I think the "without them" here literally means "if we take current industrial agriculture and simply drop pesticides" i.e. without any other change. Pretty obvious that yes, doing so will easily get you to numbers of that magnitude.
So it's a bit strange not considering the various root causes of what requires those pesticieds in the first place: monocultures on dead soil and nothing which even begins to resemble a normal ecosystem in sight. Those causes happen to be exactly among the causes of the massive insect/more general biodiversity decline we're witnessing. Along with pesticides, sure, but habitat loss is likely an even bigger factor.
So while those biopesticides are probably a net win over what is used now, it's rather unclear if they'll have a meaningful impact on that decline. Which is why reports on solutions for the decline also always include adressing at least part of the root causes, like partial shifts back to landscapes which are a mix of nature and agriculture. Where there's at least a bush/tree line between fields, for instance. Which also helps keeping certain pests in control.
A few countries in the EU have been encouraging people to fix their gardens. Remove some tiles, use native/local seeds for weeds and wild flowers and let nature do its things. That seems to work. Local insect counts are going up where that happens. Even simple things like mowing strips of grass next to the roads less often seems to help. And it's actually cheaper to not mow that so often. So, win win. They'll clear it maybe a few times per year as needed.
There have been some anecdotal reports of people having to clean their car windscreens a bit more often. That's a good thing. It means more bugs are flying around. Insect counts go up, counts of anything that eats those goes up as well.
Reducing the use of pesticides is a good idea as well. If only because modern farming still depends on pesticides and pollinator populations collapsing seems to be correlated with the use of pesticides. No pollinators, no fruit/vegetables. It's in their own interest to do something about populations collapsing. Allocating some of their land for pollinator friendly vegetation would also be smart.
A lot of over the counter toxins should be banned and in EU the use and sale of those is already restricted. Even rat poison is banned in some places now. Unfortunately, farmers seem to have successfully lobbied for being able to continue to use some pesticides. But it seems that awareness of the issue is growing; including of the health effects of living close to a farm that uses pesticides. It's likely that more restrictions will come eventually.
i had a salesman say he noticed i had a lot of spiders around outside. he asked who i currently use for pest control. i said, "the spiders." he excused himself and left.
maybe they don't make great decorations, but the spiders generally stay in their webs and don't bother me. i once watched one defeat a wasp twice its size. i might feel differently if we had any dangerous spiders around here (just black widows, and they stay in dark hidey holes), but i'm happy to trade a little space for their services.
Indeed I live somewhere that has both black widow and brown recluse and they are about the only two spiders I will actually exterminate. Even the fast scary hunter and wolf spiders get a pass
This was my about reaction when I was renting a house and a guy was going door to door to get people to sign up for yard bug spraying. Wait the bugs are already outside and you want to kill them? That’s where they live.
Asbestos... Lead, CFCs, mercury, cadmium, radium, petroleum, DDT, BPA, microplastics, PFAS, organophosphates, pyrethrins... The more wonder materials turn out to be devastating for human health or environmental stability, the more I think maybe the "no (synthetic) chemicals" crowd have a point.
Or rather, that maybe we're learning the wrong lesson each time. Maybe instead of "asbestos is bad" or "DDT is bad", the real lesson should have been "biological and ecological systems are incredibly fragile outside of the exact combination of environmental conditions and chemical inputs they've specifically evolved to handle".
Too much complexity, too many delicate mechanisms and feedback loops. Can't afford to keep playing whack-a-mole, every generation we replace the old poisons and add some new ones. If we keep introducing new molecules and quantities of substances that evolution hasn't had a chance to adapt to, then we shouldn't be surprised that we keep breaking things.
But let's not pretend we don't use pesticides for a reason. People gotta eat, and pyrethrins are already an improvement AFAIU, less toxic to mammals, similar to molecules that exist in nature. But still, a cudgel. Maybe we need to take ecological engineering seriously, control pest species by simultaneously cultivating stable ecosystems of insectivores/predators and hyperparasites, poison spray not required...
The only things that work around here are the thermacell repellents (they have a little butane fire that evaporates stuff off a mesh pad). Their effect seems pretty localized in time and space, but I wonder what's in them, and how problematic it is.
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.
I think the next best thing is an automatic turret that fires salt bullets or something, maybe AI. Hopefully it doesn't take an eye out, but if it took out like 1million mosquitoes for 1 eye, worth it?
One thing you notice if you spend much time outdoors in the US is how many invasive species there are and how they've taken over so much space. These species are often dead spaces for native insects (which is one reason they are so invasive, not being held back as native plants are). Not only is this bad for butterflies, but also for other kinds of insects, and for species like birds that prey on the insects.
I've long thought we need to be more aggressive at bringing in biological controls of these invasives. There's a tendency to be conservative about this, to not make mistakes, to study not act, but I think increasing risks have to be taken there because the existing situation is also a huge risk.
At the same time, I enjoy planting native plants in my garden. One of my favorite discoveries there was Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea), a low plant with pale blue-green leaves. When I first planted it, it was absolutely covered with caterpillars of the American (Painted) Lady butterfly. They ate down to bare stalks that then died. I thought it was done but it came back strongly and seeded enough to spread the next year. I think it's evolved to survive this sort of brutal spring pruning. I've since seen it in the wild, which was a treat.
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.
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.
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.
Around here, it isn't possible to do native lawn. The grasses are too tall and the low groundcovers can't be walked on. I'm trying to plant wildflower meadow but it will be a couple of feet high.
My idea is that there are two types of lawns. There are the lawn you use, and it is fine to be grass. But there is a lot of lawn that is landscaping and that can be native plants.
Oh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
I had a yard of mostly white clover years ago. The neat thing is that animals love it, I'd get 3 or 4 rabbits in my yard each morning - they seem to eat the white flower off the top.
The other nice thing is they don't need cutting nearly as often. I only had to cut the lawn because the stray random grasses and weeds that grew among the clovers.
All wildlife populations are in a severe decline [1][2]. More should be done about this, but I guess as a species we will have to learn the hard way.
A small way to help is to replace some or all of your lawn with native species. A lawn should be a throw rug, not wall to wall carpet that is functionally a desert. If you won't get fined for doing so.
There's also been a 30% decline in US birds in the last ~50 years. I think people underestimate how bad it is and it's not a good sign that research funding into wildlife has been cut a lot in the US recently.
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
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.
I thought lightning bugs were mostly from light pollution and deforesting? I live in the woods not near a major city, and every summer there's thousands of them still, thankfully.
I don't think there's good data on exactly why but the experts view habitat loss, artificial lights at night, and pesticide use as the top three concerns (the North Americans surveyed put pesticides above light pollution but globally it was the opposite).
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.
The “butterfly bush” is native to China. Milkweed is native to North America.
Milkweed is the only one that can feed the Monarch at all stages of its life, from larva to caterpillar to butterfly. When people plant butterfly bushes, it “tricks” the butterfly (or at least crowds out better options) into laying eggs where the larvae will ultimately die of starvation.
I think majority of places are beyond that point. I’ve found that planting whatever works, even if incrementally, should work. I plant natives, but for natives alone won’t work unless my entire neighborhood does so. So you supplement with non natives that provide something. Milkweed will help with the butterfly larvae but what do you feed the butterflies? Something that’s long blooming and nectar rich. So I let the red valerian that grows like an invasive weed in all conditions, remain blooming in my yard for months at a stretch.
So you supplement with non natives that provide something
I get the sentiment but tend to I disagree. Maybe some very specific species might benefit somewhat, but in general the principle makes little sense. Whatever native fauna there is in your area spent thousands of years in relationships with other native flora and fauna. So not just plants, also the soil life, the combination of plants, the terrain variation and so on. Hence replicating that as close as possible should be what works best. Which a far as nectar/pollen goes means not a single species but a combination providing it throughout the seasons. Whereas 'long blooming and nectar rich' completely ignores specialist insects which only get nectar and pollen from one particular species or group of species, insects laying eggs on specific species only, and so on. Butterfly bush is considered a McDonalds for insects, and that's actually a pretty good metaphor. Red valerian is in the same ballpark.
