Live data from Hacker News

Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

qz.com

41–50 of 181 posts

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#41
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story... For those who aren’t aware what they’re referring to by insect apocalypse, a story came out a few days ago about some seemingly very important insect research: NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalyps... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541536

There's also this paper [1] describing "biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction". Should have made front page news everywhere. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089

And it's (for now) being replaced by relatively simple cultivated ecosystems. Food crops, trees, and livestock (which I gather includes farmed fish).

Ultimately, if we can manage it without collapse, that's all that will remain. Plus us and pets, I mean. And various pathogens, parasites, and so on.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#42

If you want to see where the Monarch butterflies migrate to in the winter and what such a thing looks like, there's a great reserve near the city of Angangueo, Mexico ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angangueo ). 3.5hr bus ride from Mexico City. You get up in the morning and take a taxi higher into the mountains to the reserve, getting out and walking further up the mountain's roped off trail. The trail terminates int…

One of the most magical experiences I've had in my life was a morning out surfing alone in Huntington Beach years ago. It was a weekday in... I don't remember the time of year. October? May? When do they usually end up in Southern California?[0] The details are in a journal or lost text file somewhere.

It was a beautiful Southern California morning. Clear skies, a breath of offshores, clean inconsistent chest-high waves. I was sitting outside waiting for the next wave. And all of the sudden a few Monarch butterflies flew past me. And they were followed by a few more. And more after that.

A steady stream of orange and black butterflies fluttering past me. Coming in OFF the ocean towards shore. Was it 5 minutes? 15 minutes? An hour? The procession ended. I remember spotting the butterflies here and there the rest of the day, even many miles inland.

C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Moments that will be lost to those who follow us.

[0] https://www.tripsavvy.com/monarch-butterflies-in-california-...

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#44
post #36

I'm no statistician, but the general trend seems to be upward for the last ten years. https://www.westernmonarchcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/... Indeed, but for some out-of-whack numbers in 1997, the data looks fairly non-hysteria-inducing. I wonder if anything was happening in the counties where the count took place this year that might have affected the 'volunteer citizen scientist' participation? Hmm... I see…

The general trend that goes upward in your graph isn't the number of butterflies, but the number of 'sites monitored', i.e., places where they searched for butterflies. In the time that monitored sites went from ~400,000 to ~1,400,000 the number of reported butterflies stayed roughly the same (~200,000), which should be grave cause for concern. The number of butterflies should be a linear correlation with the number…

Good point. OTOH, perhaps the most fruitful sites were already monitored in 1997 and the new sites were peripheral and not expected to see as many butterflies.

Also, the graph doesn't define "Total Monarch Abundance". That number might be an extrapolation of butterflies scaled by the number of sites, not the literal number of butterflies counted.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#45

If you want to see where the Monarch butterflies migrate to in the winter and what such a thing looks like, there's a great reserve near the city of Angangueo, Mexico ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angangueo ). 3.5hr bus ride from Mexico City. You get up in the morning and take a taxi higher into the mountains to the reserve, getting out and walking further up the mountain's roped off trail. The trail terminates int…

One of the most magical experiences I've had in my life was a morning out surfing alone in Huntington Beach years ago. It was a weekday in... I don't remember the time of year. October? May? When do they usually end up in Southern California?[0] The details are in a journal or lost text file somewhere. It was a beautiful Southern California morning. Clear skies, a breath of offshores, clean inconsistent chest-high wa…

I grew up in the mountains near there (near Big Bear). I used to love the monarchs flying through our canyon every year. I've not seen them in what feels like a decade.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#46
This is one of the most obviously not proofread articles I've seen in a while, particularly among ones that made it to HN.

For example:

> a 2017 modeling paper in Biological Conservation (pdf) found that 30,000 butterflies adult butterflies are probably the smallest viable population.

"butterflies" is repeated.

> Its population has fallen by 97% since the 1980s, and is at just 99.5% of its original abundance.

If Monarch populations were at 99.5% of their original abundance, we'd be celebrating or heavily investigating why they haven't been more adversely affected by human activity. They almost certainly mean 0.5%.

Now the first might be a "minor" error, but it's still something obvious enough to be caught on a scan. The second? That's a massive factual error. Seriously, who publishes stuff like this?

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#47
post #12

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

You're assuming that's just due to insecticides. Insects are exposed to multiple stressors. One of them also happens to be global warming. Others are habitat loss, insecticides, invasive species, etc. In fact the researchers measuring the loss of insect biomass in puerto rico rainforests attributed it primarily to climate change since the other factors do not apply there.

I was going to mention the same thing. I too up until the puerto rico article blamed insecticides. But something much larger seems to be going on.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#48
post #39

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

> All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. I am not aware of any scientific publication showing a causal link. Let's be a little careful about this. By increasing crop yields and reducing deaths from insect borne diseases, insecticides have greatly reduced human suffering over the past century. It's possible that insecticides are the cause, and if so, something has to be done, but such decisions need to be bas…

Yeah, but think about it: insect population is down? why keep using pesticides at the same level as usual?? And if you reduce pesticide use because there's fewer insects, and if the insect population recovers, then you'll have some very suggestive evidence (still not dispositive, but so what). There's a hypothesis to test, so let's test it.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#49
post #12

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

You're assuming that's just due to insecticides. Insects are exposed to multiple stressors. One of them also happens to be global warming. Others are habitat loss, insecticides, invasive species, etc. In fact the researchers measuring the loss of insect biomass in puerto rico rainforests attributed it primarily to climate change since the other factors do not apply there.

The variations in surface temperature we have seen in the modern era are nothing compared to what we've seen in the recent geological record. Moreover, insects are very sturdy throughout the geological record, so it's very difficult to believe that less than 1C change in a century could cause this (the end of the last glacial period saw a 7C swing in just a few hundred years). It's pretty clear that climate change is not the stressor causing this.

EDIT: Allow me to expand.

As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/.)

But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We can be fairly certain that land use changes are not the cause: the brunt of land use changes in North America happened many decades ago, but the change in insect population density is very recent.

Could the cause be something else? Yes, absolutely, but climate change is almost certainly not it -- recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia, let alone the past 18ky. And note that there is absolutely no way to test whether climate change is a cause -- how can we change the climate back in the kind of timescale we need to respond to the insect crisis in??

There aren't very many plausible causes that come to mind besides insecticides and herbicides, really, and those can be ruled in or out pretty trivially: just reduce the use of them in some large region (a few tens of thousands of acres, contiguous, say) and see what happens. The timescale for testing any hypothesis about these chemicals causing insect die-offs is on the order of... one year, maybe two -- maximum five. If insect populations don't rebound we don't need to keep using insecticides anyways, thus saving the industry a fair bit of money.

There's also Occam's razor...

No, pointing the finger at climate change strikes me as begging for a disaster. It's a hypothesis that cannot be tested fast enough. Insisting that we test it before testing any hypothesis that we can test in just a few years (and at a savings to industry!) is irresponsible and irrational.

Science is testing falsifiable hypotheses. Here we have one. So try and falsify it. The insecticide hypothesis is cheap and easy to test, and doesn't require much time.

You might argue that testing those hypotheses that are easy to test is like a drunk person looking for their car keys under the street lamp, and you might be right, but if the only other hypotheses you have are not falsifiable, then the only science you can do is: come up with more falsifiable hypos if you can, and test those you have now and come up with later. Cost is absolutely an issue, naturally, and again, the cost of testing the insecticide hypo is low, but the cost of testing the climate change hypo is simply not even within reach.

Re: Monarch butterfly populations in U.S. west are down an order of magnitude

#50
post #39

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not w…

> All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. I am not aware of any scientific publication showing a causal link. Let's be a little careful about this. By increasing crop yields and reducing deaths from insect borne diseases, insecticides have greatly reduced human suffering over the past century. It's possible that insecticides are the cause, and if so, something has to be done, but such decisions need to be bas…

Ironclad facts, science, studies, & research are great. However, if we are facing imminent collapse of pollinator populations (which would lead to a lot of human suffering) the precautionary principal starts to look interesting.

In other words, if we run the risk of population collapse within ten years, and population collapse will lead to crop failure and mass starvation & death, but rigorous studies on cause will take fifteen years to complete... do we wait for them to finish?

Post reply on HN