Butterflies are in decline across North America, a look at the Western Monarch
73 points by 1659447091 2 hours ago | 18 comments
tastyfreeze 2 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.
replyI 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.
downboots 54 minutes ago
We'll hopefully look back at these like we now see asbestos. All our scientific advancement doesn't fix myopia. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/how-...
replynomel 34 minutes 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.
replyceejayoz 58 minutes ago
We had a really bad year of mosquitos and got one of the spraying services in.
replyAn hour later, monarch having a seizure on our porch. Oops. Never again.
micromacrofoot 2 hours ago
it is not love, we need to make it unprofitable
replyhomeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures
tabbytown 2 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.
replyfooqux 50 minutes ago
I wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
replydqv 10 minutes 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.
replyI'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.
jihadjihad 40 minutes ago
> Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
replyIt’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 37 minutes ago
Dutch white clover is easy and cheap to purchase, at least in the United States:
replyhttps://www.google.com/search?q=Dutch+white+clover+seed+for+...
kleton 2 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
replytempaccount5050 20 minutes 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.
replyOctoth0rpe 16 minutes 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.
reply
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...
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)