A 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.
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
#12A 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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#13My 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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#14Even 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?
Discovering and resolving problems for one species will very likely reveal or resolve problems for other species. It seems hard to lose.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#158,000 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?
I’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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#16Considering the weather patterns (cold and wet in the west cost), this wouldn't be the case without global warming. Bad news.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#17Nice 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...)
Hardly 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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#18When 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.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#19Even 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?
Monarch butterflies are beautiful and I want them to continue to exist. I can’t speak for others but for me that is reason enough.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#20This 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 with…
Yeah, 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.