[HN Gopher] Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived ...
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Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California
to overwinter
Author : RickJWagner
Score : 305 points
Date : 2021-10-31 02:51 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Considering the weather patterns (cold and wet in the west cost),
| this wouldn't be the case without global warming. Bad news.
| [deleted]
| esarbe wrote:
| Well, the breeding patterns of single species fluctuate very
| much. Global warming could be an issue, could not be an issue
| here.
|
| In the long run, global warming will definitively wreck havoc,
| so; still bad news.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Even with the acknowledgement of the concept "flagship species"
| in conservation, I still don't get the obsession of monarch
| butterflies. The effort put into it seems to be pretty "narrow"
| for lack of better words (as in, it can't help much for other
| species). Did I miss something about how important it is?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Sometimes people just care about things that make us happy
| sethammons wrote:
| people like LCMs: Large Charismatic Mammals. Tigers and
| elephants are easier to get funding to help compared to some
| ugly fish. People find most bugs gross and so are unlikely to
| help out. But the monarch is beautiful and many people remember
| them fluttering through their lives every year.
| gerbilly wrote:
| > it can't help much for other species
|
| Many of the solutions for reversing monarch also have positive
| side effects for other species.
|
| All life is connected. One species can alert you to the
| deterioration of an entire ecosystem.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Anything to get people to care about insect biomass, imo.
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| Monarch butterflies are beautiful and I want them to continue
| to exist. I can't speak for others but for me that is reason
| enough.
| Igelau wrote:
| You need better reasons than that. I doubt this is the case
| with monarch butterflies, but there are certainly lots of
| plant/animal species that are aesthetically pleasing but
| become invasive and wholly detrimental.
|
| If I'm not mistaken, monarchs are poisonous due to their
| diet, so there's some potential for negative impact if they
| overrun a niche that some other animal was planning to eat.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Monarchs have migrated for thousands of years between
| remote locations, long before humans had a large impact on
| the environment.
| esarbe wrote:
| Nope, it's just that for people it's easy to just focus on a
| few species instead of the whole web.
|
| It also allows people to think "Yeah, that one particular
| species had a good year, so everything is fine and we can go
| back to business as usual".
|
| I for one don't hold my breath.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Discovering and resolving problems for one species will very
| likely reveal or resolve problems for other species. It seems
| hard to lose.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Obligatory George Carlin ref:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
| ehnto wrote:
| Anecdotally there has been an increase in Australia over the past
| five years, I see heaps of them whenever I go riding now and some
| about my house in suburbia.
|
| I went to a small national park, a strip between two roads, and
| it was loaded with butterflies and dragonflies. It was like a
| disney film. It makes me think that vehicle pollution isn't their
| biggest threat but rather incecticides.
| deep-root wrote:
| This is wonderful news, 13,000 sightings in one location is 6x
| more than ALL western US locations last year.
|
| Western US populations have collapsed: 4.5m in 80s, 1.2m in 1997,
| to 100k in 2002, to 2k in 2020.[1][2]
|
| One issue is Monarch larva can only eat two plants: both
| milkweeds, toxic to their predators. Birds will vomit and then
| avoid them.[3] However, in recent years not one milkweed plant
| could be identified without heavy insecticide contamination. Even
| when no pesticides were used by the landowners or nearby.[4]
|
| The Xerces Society is an excellent starting place to learn and
| get involved. https://xerces.org/monarchs
|
| [1] https://www.fws.gov/news/ShowNews.cfm?_ID=36817 [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#/media/File:...
| [3] https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-case-of-the-
| barfi... [4]
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2020.00162...
| ddoolin wrote:
| Random anecdote: I keep a couple of milkweeds casually on my
| 4th story apartment balcony in SoCal and I get many monarchs
| coming thru, sometimes a handful of cocoons at a time. I got a
| cheap butterfly enclosure and I put the entire plant in it to
| keep spiders and the like from getting to them either in the
| cocoon or shortly after. I purchased the plant only
| incidentally as it looked nice and the monarchs were a pleasant
| addition.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| Thank you for your service.
| vanattab wrote:
| I thought all monarchs made their cocoons in mexico?
| reportingsjr wrote:
| I'm not sure about the western monarch, but the eastern
| monarchs out here in the midwest grow as caterpillars here
| and pupate in to a butterfly. I don't think they lay eggs
| down in mexico, I think they only have the butterfly form
| down there.
|
| Additionally, there are three or four generations of them
| as they migrate. They don't migrate in one huge push. So
| the ones in mexico will migrate back north a bit, lay eggs,
| and die. Then that new generation will become adults,
| migrate north, and lay eggs, and die. Eventually they will
| reverse and start migrating south, laying eggs, and dying.
| Finally the last generation makes it to mexico to hang out
| for a while and avoid the cold, before starting it all over
| again!
| gbrown wrote:
| The migration requires multiple instars, so they reproduce
| on the way.
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, I haven't been seeing Monarchs for some time now, though
| just in the past few weeks I saw both a Queen (Danaus gilippus,
| a relative of the Monarch) and two Snout-Nosed butterflies
| (Libytheana bachmanii, another migratory species).
|
| Not sure why, but this season does seem to have more
| butterflies than usual, at least locally. So maybe it's not
| just Monarchs.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Xerces is great and deserves your support if this is an issue
| you care about!
| bbarnett wrote:
| I wonder.
|
| One mutation, and an a species can become resistant to certain
| toxins. For example, the plant itself is toxic to birds, yet
| the monarch eats it.
|
| Did some mutation happen, and now the progeny of that lineage
| are multiplying? If other monarchs die, they'd have lots of
| food available, so would exponentially grow.
|
| Hmm.
| 01100011 wrote:
| And if you're in CA and want to plant milkweed, please make
| sure it's a native milkweed.
|
| From https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2021-04-01/how-to-
| fi...:
|
| > Which brings us to the reason why tropical milkweed is such a
| problem in Southern California. See, tropical milkweed works
| fine as caterpillar food in colder parts of the United States,
| when it dies back during the winter, killing any parasites that
| live on the plants. But in Southern California tropical
| milkweed stays green and blooming year round. Xerces Society
| researchers believe this evergreen milkweed confuses normal
| monarch migration and allows harmful microscopic parasites --
| Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, or OE -- to multiply on the
| plants. Monarch caterpillars end up eating a lot of this nasty
| parasite as they devour the leaves and researchers believe OE
| is sickening the adults, messing up their lifespans, migration
| patterns and ability to reproduce.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Nice thing about r-selected species is that when the conditions
| are right... they can recovery really quickly.
|
| (unlike k-selected species like gorillas where the recovery takes
| many generations and decades...)
| wglass wrote:
| Hardly recovered. Just a little better than last year.
|
| When my 19 year old was 2, we used to go to Santa Cruz Natural
| Bridges State Park, one of the spots they overwinter. The
| monarchs hung in thick cable-like strands from all the trees.
| As the day warmed, the sky swarmed with many thousands. Two
| thousand total is still a pittance. This population remains in
| dire straits.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| When I was a kid on a farm in Saskatchewan, there were hundreds
| of Cabbage butterflies in my backyard, and usually a dozen or so
| Monarchs. I remember the Monarchs being easy to catch with my
| hands, as if they weren't afraid.
|
| Now that I know how much their population has depleted, these
| memories feel extremely idyllic to me.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| It is interesting that people from about a +/- 20 year group
| have your same experience. One that shows you have memories of
| what was once but now, in the same lifetime, is no more.
| MAGZine wrote:
| I have nothing else to add but a friendly wave to another
| saskatchewan kid. it's not everyday!
| pengaru wrote:
| Not Monarch Butterflies, but my youth included a similar
| experience with Lightning Bugs. They completely disappeared
| from our yards by my teens, but before then, a major part of
| the non-winter experience was catching and releasing them in
| bare hands at dusk.
|
| We took it for granted at the time.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| I've noticed that areas in parks that have been left as
| "prairies" (basically, not mown and wildflowers allowed to
| bloom) have oodles of fireflies, and mown lawns have almost
| none.
|
| I bet you'd get a ton of fireflies back if you left a small
| patch of your yard with longer grasses and wildflowers.
|
| People get annoying at having even areas of less manicured
| yards, but you'll get a ton more lightning bugs, lady bugs,
| butterflies, bumble bees, etc.
| fhsm wrote:
| Yes. It's shocking. I spend the past few decades assuming
| that I'd left them not that they'd left the earth. With covid
| I temporarily returned to the farm of my childhood and they
| were one of the most conspicuous collapses.
|
| They used to be so numerous that they defined their own time
| of day - the magical cooling after mosquitos and before
| bedtime. Not any more. They are gone and mosquitoes no longer
| appear to be afraid of the dark.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > mosquitoes no longer appear to be afraid of the dark.
|
| Might be the Asian Tiger Mosquito[0]. They are active 24/7,
| unlike their crepuscular North American cousins. They also
| go for your ankles, so you usually don't get the "mosquito
| whine" in your ear before you're bitten. They've even
| evolved to overwinter in freezing conditions.
|
| [0] https://cisr.ucr.edu/invasive-species/asian-tiger-
| mosquito
| ericb wrote:
| During the covid lockdown, I had some fireflies in my
| backyard. Gone this year, and I haven't seen them in any of
| the other years I've been here. I wonder if there's a
| correlation?
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I'm glad the lightning bugs haven't disappeared in my area,
| but I wonder what would wipe them out in a region. I'm
| leaning towards drought, but insecticides and habitat
| destruction could play a role as well.
|
| I'm in the Chicago area, and I see them in Michigan, Indiana,
| and Wisconsin as well. This was a good year for them in my
| neighborhood.
| gjkood wrote:
| If you live near San Francisco, the Bay Area or Silicon Valley
| there is a Monarch Butterfly overwintering site in the Ardenwood
| Historical Farms, Fremont.
|
| The season is from November to February.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| A blip caused by COVID I would suspect. I can see a year with
| lower levels of human activity helping butterflies and other
| relatively delicate creatures quite a bit. Good news, but I'd
| wait until 2023 before I got too excited.
| not2b wrote:
| A couple of decades ago you would see huge numbers of monarchs in
| the winter in Santa Cruz and Pacific Grove, but in recent years
| there have been almost none. I hope they manage to recover.
| psidhu wrote:
| I've been living in the Grover Beach area for ~4 years, but
| visiting the monarch grove for about 15. This year has been _one_
| of the better so far. With the milkweed I planted at the house I
| bought this year here, and milkweed I've seen my neighbors
| planting, I hope to continue to the uprise of their
| proliferation. That being said, my parents reported that in the
| 80s, there were about 2000x more of them than even now, so...
| esarbe wrote:
| Monarch butterflies are nice and such, but let's not take this as
| an indication that everything is hunky-dory. The world's still
| going to hell in a hand basket if we don't address the predatory
| ecosystem exploitation that's currently driving our global
| economy. Habitat destruction is continuing, we still poison our
| fields and rivers and we still continue to cut apart vital
| ecosystems into smaller and smaller patches get more vulnerable
| every time.
|
| But still; go little butterfly!
| nojs wrote:
| This seems like a website dedicated to only good news stories.
| Cool idea!
|
| > Since 1997, millions of people have turned to the Good News
| Network(r) as an antidote to the barrage of negativity
| experienced in the mainstream media.
| 14 wrote:
| My neighbor used to pay us a quarter if we caught a butterfly and
| gave it to her. Dead or alive as long as it was intact. She liked
| to pin them up and then paint them. She was a shitty painter and
| all her work sucked and I have huge regrets over spending days
| killing butterflies and other bugs but can only say I was a young
| kid and would never do so now. I want to plant some milkweed to
| make up for my past.
| [deleted]
| agrover wrote:
| Good news, everyone!
| aunty_helen wrote:
| I went to Mexico January past and lucked out that it was
| butterfly season. Ever since raising them with my own milkweed
| plants I had wanted to see this sight.
|
| I can only encourage tourism for this event, a million butterflys
| flapping their wings definitely makes a sound and hopefully the
| more tourists that go to see them, the more value is placed on
| protecting their forestry reserves.
| [deleted]
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| Anecdotally, I saw many more monarchs (or butterflies that
| appeared to be monarchs) this last summer than I have seen in
| over 20 years.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Same for my family. We don't count them, but we absolutely do
| make a point of noticing them. There were a lot more in our
| pollinator garden this summer than prior years.
| [deleted]
| choppaface wrote:
| 8,000 monarchs in the Pismo Beach Grove holy crap!!! It's been
| completely barren. Is it the La Nina weather? or is it too hot in
| the south?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I'd be pretty surprised if we have answer to why this is
| happening just yet. It'll probably take scientists a while to
| come up with plausible theories.
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