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Butterflies are in decline across North America, a look at the Western Monarch
- fooqux 6mo agoI wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
- jihadjihad 6mo 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-zealand-white-clover-cover-crop-seed-979.html https://www.johnnyseeds.com/farm-seed/legumes/clovers/new-ze...
- tmoertel 6mo agoDutch 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+sale https://www.google.com/search?q=Dutch+white+clover+seed+for+... https://www.ernstseed.com/product/white-clover-dutch/ https://www.ernstseed.com/product/white-clover-dutch/
- dqv 6mo agoI 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.
- salynchnew 6mo agoYou can get alternative bulk mowable native lawn substitute seeds from the Thomas Payne Foundation.
- amatecha 6mo agoOh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
- ianburrell 6mo agoAround 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.
- silisili 6mo agoI 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.
- tastyfreeze 6mo agoIt 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 6mo agoit is not love, we need to make it unprofitable homeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures
- fooqux 6mo 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. :/
- micromacrofoot 6mo agoyeah exactly, it can be done but it's harder and more expensive (though likely not as expensive as meat industry subsidies)
- ceejayoz 6mo agoWe 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 6mo agoYep, 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.
- tabbytown 6mo agoI 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.
- culi 6mo agoYou'll love this. Audobon has this really neat page where you enter in a zip code and it gives you a list of native plants along with all the birds that associate with it. It also lists out butterflies and other pollinators—though that's not the main purpose of it https://www.audubon.org/plantsforbirds https://www.audubon.org/plantsforbirds TIP: the zip code entry box also has a space for your email. You can just ignore that box and only enter the zip code. Here's an example page: https://www.audubon.org/native-plants/best-results?zipcode=90210 https://www.audubon.org/native-plants/best-results?zipcode=9...
- kleton 6mo agoGen 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
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoMaybe not directly, but they definitely care about property value which gets you municipal codes requiring you to mow your lawn or get fined.
- Octoth0rpe 6mo agoOn 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.
- pkaye 6mo agoI 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.
- 01100011 6mo agoThey don't yet.. we'll see what happens when the boomers die off and the younger(now older) generations inherit those homes.
- silisili 6mo agoI 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.
- tdb7893 6mo agoI 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). This is the survey of experts but is probably behind a paywall. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/2/157/5715071 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/2/157/5715071
- atlasagentsuite 6mo ago[dead]
- 1659447091 6mo 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8ZyJn6BENc https://swmonarchs.org/ProjectMonarch.php https://swmonarchs.org/ProjectMonarch.php https://celltracktech.com/pages/project-monarch-press-release-march-19-2026 https://celltracktech.com/pages/project-monarch-press-releas...
- JCBird1012 6mo agoA related project, but for birds - https://motus.org 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 https://www.lotek.com)
- jna_sh 6mo agoMotus 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.”
- sholladay 6mo agoStop planting butterfly bushes! It’s a trap. Instead, plant milkweed. Support their entire lifecycle. The names of these plants ought to be changed.
- Kaliboy 6mo agoI'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.
- jonah 6mo agoYou should only be planting native species whatever they are for your specific area.
- sholladay 6mo agoThe “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.
- jonah 6mo agoThere are many species of milkweed and they're not all the same to the butterflies. Try to grow the ones that are native to your area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias#Ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias#Ecology https://www.growmilkweedplants.com/map https://www.growmilkweedplants.com/map
- IAmBroom 6mo agoThe most popular cultivars are from China, but there are also native American butterfly bush (Buddleja). I've heard the native ones support monarch's throughout their lives, but now I'm seeing that's not so - which would be odd... Why would Monarchs evolve to lay eggs where they'd starve?
- shoobiedoo 6mo agoI'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.
- mijowi 6mo agoI 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!
- contingencies 6mo agoUsed 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.
- culi 6mo agoTake a piss somewhere and wait 10 minutes. It'll be swarmed with butterflies who want the minerals you've laid out for them. The Amazonian soil is actually extremely poor because of how much water runs through its soil. It's one of the reasons such biodiversity evolved in the first place. Poor soils favor a diversity of strategies while rich soils tend to form monocultures that quickly dominate (Ofc terra preta, amongst other indigenous technologies, have also radically shaped the soil and its fertility)
- julianeon 6mo agoThis was common in America once. Around the 1900's, in "wild" places like Texas, you'll see references to clouds of butterflies, in memoirs and such.
- nemo 6mo agoI 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.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoI remember these fluorishes from my ATX childhood. Now, a few states away, I still won't cut down milkweed (their feedsource). Already, I'm beginning to worry about this year's hummingbird migration (my feeders, typically guarded by now, have been rotting for weeks). Even from a decade ago, local firefly populations seem diminished #Appalachia But $tock$ are up. Rejoice.
- Rover222 6mo agoPesticides... messing up everything from butterflies to human colon cells at the moment.
- everdrive 6mo agoBut we have to poison ourselves and future generations! What if we were forced to notice some insects and arachnids? The alternative is unthinkable.
- analog8374 6mo ago[dead]
- oomuinio 6mo ago[dead]
- wewewedxfgdf 6mo agoWe need the poison we spray through the entire environment to kill only non-beautiful insects. Startup opportunity, anyone?
- randomNumber7 6mo agoLasers controlled by AI computer vision?
- internet_points 6mo ago"specific" pesticides is a lucrative myth that has been told and sold for a hundred years
- DivingForGold 6mo agoIn decline ? Really ? Come take the dozens of passionflower butterflys away from my yard whose caterpillars are gnawing my plants to the ground !
- picafrost 6mo agoAll 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. [1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastrophic-73-decline-in-the-average-size-of-global-wildlife-populations-in-just-50-years-reveals-a-system-in-peril/ https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
- tdb7893 6mo agoThere'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. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaw1313 https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaw1313
- triage8004 6mo agoI'm seriously worried about how few fireflies butterflies and bees are left. We aren't changing our pesticides and they are disappearing
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- everdrive 6mo agoEverything'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.
- pfdietz 6mo agoOne 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.
- bradley13 6mo agoMass agriculture and pesticides.
- tim333 6mo agoThere was an article four days ago about 12 million hectares to grow corn for fuel and that energy from solar is 30x more efficient. Maybe they could make a few million of that nature reserve and put solar on other parts? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868063)
- bradley13 6mo agoGrowing corn for fuel only makes sense due to government subsidies, achieved through lobbying. Otherwise, it is a stupid and wasteful idea.
- atlasagentsuite 6mo ago[dead]