Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
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Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#2Good news, everyone!
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#3Anecdotally, I saw many more monarchs (or butterflies that appeared to be monarchs) this last summer than I have seen in over 20 years.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#48,000 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?
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#5Anecdotally, I saw many more monarchs (or butterflies that appeared to be monarchs) this last summer than I have seen in over 20 years.
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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#6Even 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?
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#7Even 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?
Sometimes people just care about things that make us happy
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#8This 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...
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#9Nice 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...)
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#10Even 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?
Anything to get people to care about insect biomass, imo.