7 ms·
Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
- psidhu 5y agoI'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...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- esarbe 5y agoMonarch 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!
- agrover 5y agoGood news, everyone!
- mcbutterbunz 5y agoAnecdotally, I saw many more monarchs (or butterflies that appeared to be monarchs) this last summer than I have seen in over 20 years.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoSame 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.
- choppaface 5y ago8,000 monarchs in the Pismo Beach Grove holy crap!!! It’s been completely barren. Is it the La Niña weather? or is it too hot in the south?
- ashtonkem 5y agoI’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.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoEven 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?
- doyouevensunbro 5y agoMonarch 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 5y agoYou 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 5y agoMonarchs have migrated for thousands of years between remote locations, long before humans had a large impact on the environment.
- ramesh31 5y agoSometimes people just care about things that make us happy
- bpodgursky 5y agoAnything to get people to care about insect biomass, imo.
- steve_adams_86 5y agoDiscovering and resolving problems for one species will very likely reveal or resolve problems for other species. It seems hard to lose.
- deep-root 5y agoThis 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 https://xerces.org/monarchs [1] https://www.fws.gov/news/ShowNews.cfm?_ID=36817 https://www.fws.gov/news/ShowNews.cfm?_ID=36817 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#/media/File:Western_monarch_populations_1997-2013.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#/media/File:... [3] https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-case-of-the-barfing-blue-jay/ https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-case-of-the-barfi... [4] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2020.00162/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2020.00162...
- Natsu 5y agoYeah, 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.
- ddoolin 5y agoRandom 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 5y agoThank you for your service.
- bpodgursky 5y agoNice 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 5y agoHardly 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.
- russellbeattie 5y agoA 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 5y agoA 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.
- 14 5y agoMy 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.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoConsidering the weather patterns (cold and wet in the west cost), this wouldn't be the case without global warming. Bad news.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- esarbe 5y agoWell, 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.
- nightowl_games 5y agoWhen 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.
- pengaru 5y agoNot 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.
- ericb 5y agoDuring 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 5y agoI'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.
- reportingsjr 5y agoI'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 5y ago
- azinman2 5y agoObligatory George Carlin ref: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
- therealdrag0 5y agoThis is not a good take. It is patently obvious that humans have a large impact on the environment, and we value aspects of the environment. Just because some form of life is likely to survive our footprints, does not mean the things we value don't need to be stewarded to be maintained. Carlin talks as if trying to protect species is interfering, wheres the opposite is not?! Humans are interfering no matter what, and it doesn't make sense to pretend otherwise. So if we're interfering no-matter what, let us be circumspect about it.
- aunty_helen 5y agoI 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.
- ehnto 5y agoAnecdotally 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nojs 5y agoThis seems like a website dedicated to only good news stories. Cool idea! > Since 1997, millions of people have turned to the Good News Network® as an antidote to the barrage of negativity experienced in the mainstream media.
- gjkood 5y agoIf 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.