Can we stop the decline of monarch butterflies and other pollinators?
wisfarmer.com
wisfarmer.com
It's been such an exciting thing to do every year and the kids love helping out too. It's a fun, satisfying, and easy way to help out! Highly recommend :)
I'd like to do the same. Any suggestions for getting started?
You go out, look for the tiny eggs on the milkweed, bring the milkweed leaves in, wait for them to hatch, and bring in fresh milkweed leaves for food once a day. We put them in a paper-towel-lined baking pan so that they have something soft to crawl on if they wander off to taste-test new leaf. They start out rather tiny and grow to into big fat caterpillars. Eventually they stop eating to go on walkabout and anchor themselves somewhere near the top of the enclosure. (Sometimes they are dumb and you have to relocate them with pins or tape.) Once they emerge as butterflies, set them free.
We do black swallowtails too. They like dill and parsely.
We never get tired of it. We have had 20-something butterflies at a time in a 2-sqft enclosure.
We just stayed at a fireplace where they do it. It's very satisfing, no trouble
There was a company out of Quebec that was trying to commercialize making clothing with the fibers from the seed pods. They're not quite long enough to spin, but they make an excellent substitute for down for stuffing.
I have to wonder if some good old fashioned selective breeding could produce a milkweed variety that produces fiber in the pods suitable for textile industry.
The fiber on the silk from the mature pods is too short and lacks the scales that cotton has to make it useful for textiles. It is the bast fibers from the stems that make fairly good fiber but the moisture content is very high so unlike flax the fiber tends to just rot during retting.
Which seems promising to me, at least.
Again it seems like a plant that with some smart old fashioned selective breeding could be made a lot more useful. But that kind of horticultural work has on the whole fallen out of fashion, it seems.
For the healthiest to butterfly option, your milkweed should die back yearly in whatever climate you plant it.
This helps encourage butterflies to migrate at the appropriate time and prevents parasite load from building up.
https://www.science.org/content/article/plan-save-monarch-bu...
Alternatively, you can cut it back yearly... but safer to just get ahold of a local species.
If you're looking to attract butterflies there are other endangered butterflies that can use your help. E.g. the Misison blue butterfly likes certain species of lupine. Black swallowtails, while not endangered, love dill. Don't underestimate how much even just a couple caterpillars will eat.
Other fauna seem a lot less picky. The hummingbirds out here seem to like the natives and "exotics" equally. The leafcutter and carpenter bees too. If you're in California, Calscape (dot org) is a great resource. And if you're in the Bay Area there are plenty of nurseries that specialize in native landscaping that can offer guidance. In the LA area, check out the Theodore Payne Foundation.
Monarchs are so amazing. I recall in the early 1980s in Lake Tahoe, they would cover entire trees during their migrations. They are the most amazing evolutionary creatures migrating 2,000+ miles over multiple generations, whereby every 3rd? gen on the migration is the Super Generation that has all the 'Valkeryie' Genes that transmit the genetic knowledge forth...
Monsanto and pavement killed the Monarch.
Milkweed is fundamental to the eco system, and (this is IMO) due to its very fluidic and milky nectar that was consumed by many, it was an easy vector for Glyphosate which is literally feeding Krokodile (russian battery-acid-heroin) to Planet earth. - but being the Monarchs Sole food....
We are doomed to the petrochem blight (its not about "electrical power" -- its about forever chemicals and extinct entire food chains.
---
There is a great documentary on Teflon called "The Devil We Know" - regarding teflon forever chemicals in all of us. I was milling about in the garage and I needed some tape for the hose I was fixing - an I grabbed a roll of teflon tape for the threading -- then it hit me.
My dad owned the Timberland Water Company in Tahoe. growing up he was plumbing here and plumbing there... every where a plumber plumbed the teflon tape was there too...
Also, growing up in Tahoe - we were big skiiers - and to eschew the snow we would spray ScotchGuard all over our clothes. ScotchGuard is Liquid Teflon Aerosol Spray. Yum and we would spray ourselves down in that while wearing our snow gear.
I had to look up how it's made after you said that. What I found:
The simple and cheap domestic production process involves boiling 80-400mg of codeine with a diluting agent (mostly paint thinner that may contain lead, zinc or ferrous agents), gasoline, hydrochloric acid, iodine, and red phosphorous (which is scraped from the striking surfaces on matchboxes). In this process, desomorphine is generated from codeine (3-methylmorphine) via two intermediate steps (alpha-chlorocodide and desocodeine). The process takes 10-45 minutes. The final product is a suspension that contains desomorphine as the psychoactive core, along with all other agents involved in the production process.
This really is evocative of "crocodile", very interesting coincidence between that and the skin damage caused by iv use of the drug
"Another problem with tropical milkweed is that it harbors a one-celled parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, called OE for short. Because tropical milkweed does not die out in winter, the parasite does not die back either. Monarchs with large numbers of this parasite – which coevolved with monarchs and does not infect other species – are born with crumpled wings and cannot fly; the less infected are smaller, have shorter lifespans, fly poorly or are unsuccessful at mating. Only the healthiest butterflies reach overwintering areas in Mexico; butterflies with this parasite do not survive long migrations. "
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/08/03/more-abut-monarch-bu...
All these other plants you mentioned do attract pollinators but they don't propagate as well, they are only where they have been planted at least around here. Even on the warmer Atlantic coast, rosemary and lavender grow well but they don't propagate nearly as much by themselves as butterfly bush (Buddleja) does.
In fact birdseed can become a sort of "trap", (much like milkweed being available at the wrong times of year for monarchs) where it tricks their biology into thinking it's a food rich area that's good for breeding, but what they need actually isn't there resulting in high mortality rate of the young they were trying to raise.
So having a bunch of garden plants getting shredded by native caterpillars is a good thing, one way or another.
TLDR: Add hosts plants for the larva. Add food sources (nectar and pollen) for the pollinators. Add safe resting spaces (old logs, leaf litter etc). Provide water. Native plants work the best, but that doesn’t mean you only have them, non natives also can be useful.
If that were the case you would expect to see large growths of it in the wild, right? Whilst I do see it in the wild, I've never seen any situation where it looks to be taking over. I just see individual plants occasionally.
(I live in the South of Germany, but the UK, where it was originally introduced in the 19th century, seems to also have a huge problem with it: https://www.cabi.org/invasivespecies/species/himalayan-balsa...)
https://vibrantgardenblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/buddleia-...
Each one of those individual plants can produce 40.000 seeds each year, so give them a decade alone and you will see. Is very invasive on river beds and disturbed soils.
Gorse in a small garden can be complicated to manage. Too spiny and it reseeds itself. Rosmary or Leptospermum can take that job.
i think adding the plant-based environment for them to thrive is the appropriate level of action, but not the human-level protection across larval stages, that's something they'll need to do for themselves in the wild or they're only going to be doomed
I do wish there was a good way to measure helping other than say "I just planted some".
Now in hot August, just before sunset, we have butterflies and bees and lots of others bugs. We didn't plant any special flowers, we just let the grass and whatever else grow. Next year I'll plant some flowers.
However, I've never seen these rules enforced unless someone calls in. The city does not have an enforcement squad who inspects the neighborhoods. On my street, my next door neighbor is the street busybody. She called in on me once because of a tree that died in early spring and by mid-June I still hadn't removed it. The city worker told me I had two weeks to remove the tree or they would, for a fee. I explained my tree guy was busy and he said no prob, now he knows it will get done.
So, we asked about the pollinator garden just to be sure.
In my town we have Neighborhood Services drive around on patrol looking for code violations. I put a chair for free at the end of my driveway for not even 24 hours and received a letter from the city. My town really is just one large HOA.
Understanding the framework you can legally act is pretty important, even if it leads to some overcautionary edge cases.
Of course it's legal! You just need to fill form DN-335, wait 4-9 weeks and you can play!
Obviously planescape campaigns are banned, being innapropriate for minors, and so are characters from underdark species as they ruin neighbourhood character.
My neighborhood doesn't have a HOA.
That just wouldn't fly here in my part of the States. A building would get burned down.
I know it's a double edged sword, but the freedom to do what I want with my own space really is something I take for granted.
The shower is outside on the back patio. The shower is fitted with hot water from the conventional water heater plumbed from the house. The shower is surrounded by a stainless steel privacy screen and a lot of really tall tropical plants. It’s the one feature that friends and family seem to like the most about the cottage. But the county authorities said it was completely illegal.
First, the county inspector cited the raw sewerage that was being released into the environment. By “raw sewerage” he was referring to warm soapy water. The “environment” in this case was my rural back garden. The remedy was to plumb the outdoor shower with a drain that carried the “sewerage” into the septic system for safe disposal. I had this work done at some considerable expense that I struggled to afford at the time. Then the inspector was invited back to final the plumbing permit. Unfortunately he cited the project for another violation instead. It seems that rain water was able to drain into the outdoor shower and enter the septic system which was a code violation. He couldn’t have told me this earlier? Evidently inspectors shy away from proscribing holistic solutions. Instead they just look at what’s in front of them and check off boxes on their clip boards. It’s up to the property owner to understand and comply with the impenetrable codes on their own. So I covered the outdoor shower with a simple roof that prevented the rain from entering the drain (completely ruining the whole concept of a tropical outdoor shower). When the inspector returned this too was a code violation since a covered structure with plumbing constitutes a second dwelling unit on a lot that is only zoned for one unit. I removed the roof from the shower in disgust. Finally a sympathetic neighbor said he had a similar problem with his outdoor shower and solved the problem by re-labeling it as a hose bib on the permit documents. I plugged up the shower drain with concrete, removed the shower head, and invited the inspector back to approve the hot and cold hose bibs inside the little privacy screen on the back patio. In fifteen seconds he was able to check off the little boxes on his clip board and there were no more problems with the outdoor shower. A sense of relief and calm washed over me. But it only lasted for ten seconds. The inspector then said he couldn’t sign off on the building inspection because this house didn’t have a shower or bath tub…
source: https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/building-cod...
I expect building codes and nonsense like that in cities. But not in farms.
Alternatively try living in an area with a high risk of fire. Leaving your back yard to grow wild could easily create a huge tinderbox. There are fire resistant plants suited to e.g. dry summers, but invasive stuff that's ill-suited to dry summers is just as happy to take root.
FWIW I said raptors, not hawks. So yeah. Owls, vultures, hawks, osprey, falcons, we get them all out here. When they eat a poisoned rodent they'll likely die. Scavengers that eat the dead birds will also get sick. It's bad all around. Deer are already overpopulated. None of what this person is setting out is particularly good for any of the animals. These are wild animals that are perfectly capable of finding their own, healthier, safer food.
It's like with the monarchs. Folks should be careful about where they plant milkweed in part because of the disastrous effects it can have on their migration. The same thing can happen with vertebrates like migratory birds.
There's a reason why feeding wildlife is pretty much universally condemned: it's bad for the animals.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/idkt_feedingwildlife.htm
https://www.audubon.org/news/to-feed-or-not-feed
https://dec.ny.gov/nature/wildlife-health/do-not-feed-wildli...
https://outdoor.wildlifeillinois.org/articles/revealed-the-d...
Bill's got my back. If there was a problem, he'd be the first one to tell me _how_ to work around it, and since I'm the kind of guy to want to make things easy for everyone I live around, he'd probably be the first one to help do it if I needed it.
Who knows? What I do know is you will solve nothing by pretending it's petty and for sheer prideful lack of imagination can't bring yourself to pick up a phone and spend 3 minutes asking questions.
It's government. You pay for it. Why you wouldn't expect it to be useful to you is beyond me.
They don't protect us from crime via police, they beat and imprison us if we stray from their stated path, and we have no choice to not participate. Yes we can technically choose to move to another king's domain and be serfs there. To be fair even this highly regulated legally and not an easy option for many.
Honestly, we're way passed due for a revolution. The government has become a self serving and self perpetuating machine that uses people rather than serving them.
One of the pleasant surprises I had, immigrating from the US to Australia, was discovering how much more responsive the government is to the populace, even at the municipal level. The big difference is that, here, virtually everyone votes in all elections at every level of government because it is considered a legal responsibility of citizenship, just like jury duty and taxes. This means that time-poor, lower-class single parents have exactly the same voting power as retired busybodies, and that makes a HUGE difference to how smoothly and fairly everything operates.
We have federal and state holidays that specify that those government employees have those holidays, but private employers aren't required to do anything on those days (there might be some states that impose requirements, but certainly not a majority).
https://www.sars.gov.za/tax-rates/income-tax/rates-of-tax-fo...
And yes it's "progressive", but I'm rounding up for arguments-sake due to all the "other" taxes that aren't individual income tax. Fuel levy, sugar tax, VAT, import tax (err "duties"), cigarette tax, employment insurance tax, property transfer fees/taxes, estate taxes, capital gains tax, etc.
Either way... 50% is big, but so is 40%, or 30%. Doubly so in South Africa because we have no choice but to pay for a lot of supposed government services using post-tax income (due to this being a failed 3rd world state that doesn't provide actual services). E.g. healthcare, security, fire, insurance, etc.
Cherry on top: Only 5-10% of the population even pays income tax here. So no it's not paying one's fair share, this is a giant socialist wealth-redistribution system where a good chunk gets carved out and given to the high-ranking government priesthood and otherwise connected individuals. The scraps make their way to underfunded government services for the real poor serfs to maybe get some benefit out of, unfortunately. The reason I mention this, is that it's the same in other governments, they're just less blatant about it. It's only in these extreme examples that people see the nature of what's going on, and how they are actually slave-labour for the government. Well... at least only 50% of their labour /s.
Maybe “proactive rule following”.
Some people think it's best to just avoid the drama and ask first.
The biggest pest I've seen personally has been flies. Tanchid flies will lay their egg inside the caterpillar and the larve eats the caterpillars from the inside and they die. So we round up caterpillars we see on our outdoor plants and place them in a protected mesh enclosure with potted milkweed for them to eat.
In 2021 I successfully raised 81 monarch caterpillars to full grown butterflies. In 22/23 we still had some success but I didn't have a garden so we raised 10-20 wild ones. But 2024 we have a house now and a big garden full of milkweed!
Make sure to plant native milkweed in your area!
This year none yet, I was hoping the migration hadn't started, because my milk weed is giant and ready to raise these lil things if they would just show up.
Thus far in 2024 I have 23 dead from flies. With my other 4 hatched, 11 chrysalis, 12 caterpillars that's 46% dead from flies (thus far) I suspect some of the 12 caterpillars are already gotten by the fly so roughly ~50% dead to the flies thus far.
Keep up the good work!
I highly recommend the book „Traffication“ by Paul Donald about this subject. It explains how cars harm our wildlife, not just by road kill, but also through noise-, light-, air- and salt-polution. These influences cover far more area than just the road surface, for some species the negative effects extend to more than 2km on each side of the road.
Moreover, for species that rarely cross roads, they also cut up the landscape in little pieces, reducing genetic diversity.
And all this harm definitely and directly affects insects, not just mammals. The book cites numerous studies on the subject, and it also highlights how nature conversationists seem to mostly ignore this problem, focusing more on agriculture and other harms (exactly like the article). While these other problems certainly also negatively impact our wildlife, we do seem to have a collective blindspot for our roads.
However, I will add all the "helpful pest control contractors" who want to kill every insect on my property probably don't help.
I take it you mean honey bee keeper and I'll assume American (you) and European honey bees (ie non-native to US). There is nothing wrong with that, provided you also allow for solitary bees and other pollinators too. Note that even "foreign" pollinators are still useful for pollination.
Do try to discourage "helpful pest control contractors".
As a honey bee keeper, you can't be faulted. Yes you would deploy colonies of 50,000 insects at a time into an area where the locals are not that well organised. However, thanks to the likes of neonics and monocultures, any pollinators at all are welcome.
I'm a 53 year old Brit and I live next to a park and have a very insect friendly garden. Butterflies are really down compared to my memories as a child. I do see quite a few social bees (eg bumble bees) and solitary bees (eg masonary bees) but again, they seem to be rather sparse compared to my memories. Also, a summer drive does not leave my car covered in bugs.
I have a customer: https://butterfly-conservation.org/ ... you'll have a local equivalent. I think we should all try to follow their advice, otherwise we may be the last humans to remember something and the world goes a bit "Mad Max". That's a bit unlikely but it won't end well if we do nothing.
For example, in my region, there is exactly one species that can perform buzz pollination (a specific pollination technique that is required by certain plants, including tomatoes) — blue-banded bees — but they are in decline due in large part to wild honeybee colonies.
I have worked very hard over the years to grow lots of plants specifically appealing to blue-banded bees, but I still very rarely ever see them. The flowers are overwhelmingly dominated by honeybees. I don't mind a few of them around, but there are WAY too many of them. They leave so little food for other pollinators and so few nest sites for native birds.
Professional beekeepers prevent their colonies from swarming, and many of them — certainly all the ones I know of in my area — will also capture wild colonies (and kill the colonies they cannot capture) as a service to the public to help control this nuisance invasive species. But there is only so much that a few good beekeepers can do; they are massively outnumbered by feral bee colonies released by less responsible amateur beekeepers from years past.
So buzz pollination is very important. Here in the UK I suppose bumble bees do the job. Blue banded bees are native to Australia (according to some frantic searching!)
I'm not sure what to suggest and you will know better than most what happens when you try to tinker with species introduction. Australia is practically a poster child for how not to do it but to be fair very few parts of the world are unscathed from unwise introductions. Here in the UK, Japanese Knotweed, Himalayan Balsam, a shrimp from NZ (can't remember the name) and others are a bit of an issue. We even have feral apples (thanks Romans) - not really, that was a benign introduction, that seems to have been a win/win and cider resulted!
I think we got honeybees from the Roman occupation too but the climate here means that colonies usually need some assistance to survive - wild colonies are rare. The biggest pest for honey bees here is the Varroa mite. Varroa can only live in honey bee colonies, but you let that loose and I doubt it will end well.
I can only suggest trying to find what attracts honey bees and growing that in one place and what works for blue banded bees as far away as possible.
Reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amegilla_cingulata - threats. Even Cane toads munch on them!
Its a tough one but you could try getting touch with the nearest uni biology/environmental/conservation or whatever department and see if they have any ideas.
Good luck!
Sadly, this is a woefully understudied area, and it's exceptionally rare to find easy "plant this mix to maximize resources for your local bees across the year". There's a lot of mental overhead to get through when you start getting into it.
In many of the hazelnut orchards in sandy areas, it turns out that having compacted bare soil is a huge win for the sand bees, it's exactly what they need and there can be dozen of holes made by them per square yard in some places.
If there's not natural water sources nearby, a water feature is a good thing to look into for both birds and bees.
Also note that beetles and moths are also a hugely important part of the ecosystem as well and are big pollinators, you just typically won't see them near as much as bees and butterflies. Healthy beetle populations can reduce slugs. We don't have them here, but fireflies and glowworms also heavily feed on slugs.
At least not as long as we continue to allow the agriculture industry to blanket a not-insignificant portion of the earth with glyphosate.
How is it possible that something so obvious and so catastrophic has been allowed to go on for decades? Why have so many well-meaning smart people been co-opted by Green Revolution stories?
What does this mean?
Citation very much needed.
This sounds like it was written by a member of the Monsanto PR team.
There are.. other ways, than indiscriminately spraying plant poison everywhere.
0: https://www.wri.org/research/reducing-food-loss-and-waste
This is a very famous example.
You are welcome to throw your hat into the farming ring and show the world how it is done.
But I suspect that people around the world who have decades of farming experience are paying for glyphosate for a reason.
Farmers are perfectly capable of using less glyphosphate, but the problem is that their buyers pay them so little that it isn't cost effective to do anything other than spray glypho everywhere.
With the health risks associated with glyphosphate, I assume a lot of farmers actually would love to stop using that shit.
Clearly, a farmer is not going to work for a loss, so the context of what is possible (from the farmer’s perspective) is assumed to be within the existing business and political environment.
Which is obviously that not using glyphosate makes your product priced too high.
It kills the plants where insects happen to live and breed.
Additionally there are concerns about insecticides affecting monarchs in an entirely different thread, in particular increasingly banned neonicotinoid insecticides.
Glyphosate is the easiest way to keep a property clear of plants for fire insurance reasons in California, which is really unfortunate. My family had a big conflict with our neighbor over his use of roundup to clear his land because they were trying to grow a bunch of their own stuff.
If their concern was over slight contamination, not enough to noticeably affect plant growth, then not. It's not like it would have significant effect on human health in that situation, if it has any effect at all.
In most normal conditions, large scale agro needs large scale solutions and unfortunately Glyphosate is but one of these tools to get that scale up.
But we not only allow, but often mandate that acres upon acres of land are kept that way, or the owner gets a fine. American suburbs make more space ecologically dead per inhabitant than anything else we do: The greyest of cities at least take less space.
This feels like explaining pollution by studying how many bottles are thrown into bodies of water in Orange County.
I don't mean this as an apologia for RoundUp (or Monsanto). There's a need for more attention on, and regulation of, harmful pesticides, though.
One of the coolest things I’ve come across recently is the idea of “bee homes” that you can put in your garden to provide habitat for bees. I’ve bought a couple beautiful wooden units from Scopa and we just got our first bee resident this week!
The need to clean them mostly comes from the agricultural sector though, and isn't required for small habitats with only a handful of nesting sites. My partner is a wild bee researcher, and they've been using these in the field for about 60 years. As long as the density is low, the requirement for cleaning them is optional.
I don't see a good future unless:
1) the Federal and various State governments buy up substantial lands all through this migratory corridor to preserve along this corridor as butterfly habitat.
2) Enact severe limitations on herbicides.
I love golf and hate that it's often a deeply problematic game, when, if we line the out-of-play areas with native flora, they have high enough area, and low enough humans per sq mile, that they can be effective wildlife habitats... if only the players would be satisfied with non-pristine conditions, by not using herbicides and pesticides. This is happening here and there with municipal courses in CA, but the culture of golf is still focused on surreal conditions and monostand grasses.
It's an imperfect solution, but as spawl and farmland eat up more and more native areas, I honestly don't have much of an idea what else to do.
The first is creation of natural preserve areas. The second is control of invasives by introduction of biocontrol species from their native ranges (yes, there is concern of attack on other species, but there's often no other way than biocontrol to stop an invasive, and it takes time for local controls to evolve.)
Invasive species are having a huge effect on natural ecosystems, to an extent I don't think some people understand.
Beyond that, maximizing yield on farmland is important so more area is available to be set aside for nature.
As a species we are a pitlies, merciless, relentless machine. We poison the sea. We poison the land. We poison ourselves. We are geo-engineering our planet to a point way beyond our environmental tolerances.
Because we need our phones. We need our cars. We need population to grow because otherwise nobody's making money, and we need arable land to feed that population.
We will burn.
You will all burn with us.
Who suffer are actually poor people. There is even a recent example: chemical fertilizers ban in Sri Lanka. It destroyed local farming and many poor people struggle a lot as the consequences.
I sit here, listening to a bulldozer demolishing woodland just outside the perimeter of our land in order to turn it into bare earth. Not to plant. Not to use. Just to clear, because that’s tidier, and there are wild animals in the forest.
Such is man. Our road will wash away this winter because of what they’re doing today, and while they destroy, we plant.
Like fighting the tide with a teaspoon.
People tell me there are no bees here any more - the apiculturists who put their hives in their olive groves that they spray several times a year to deter hornets (not asiatic hornets, just boring, gentle, European hornets) are puzzled by their decline. Meanwhile, I throw hives into random spots in the forest, and they are all full of bees who chose them as home.
Butterflies and moths abound - we have Europe’s largest moth, and the world’s smallest butterfly, and meadow fritillaries coat the riverbanks like a gently breathing carpet, scattering in clouds as you approach.
All we do is we let nature be, work with existing systems, cut some dead brash here to make a path, scatter some seeds and saplings there to grow the patch of scrubby trees.
Even the custodians of nature have completely lost their connection, as when one owns a tractor, one must use it.
So on I go with the teaspoon.
I'm sitting in a comfy airchair, drinking tea, and enjoying life while it is still possible. And in spite of all common sense, spending a lot of time and money planting trees and bushes, as I have done since 2010.
It is pretty apparent that we are going to have water problems in the coming decades. You don't need to be a scientist to put those two together.
I am not saying we can't fix it, I do not hold the same outlook as OP. But we will have problems. Even if you don't believe global warming, there is obvious signs of issues popping up with water, and heat. Mexico, parts of USA, Canada, etc limiting water usage and saying they'll run out if it doesn't rain. That will be a problem.
Short of a nuclear war, I don't think humanity will get close to extinction. But I think we are on a path to lose access to today's cultural knowledge (like microchips, vaccines, aviation). If the population is forced to shrink over the next couple of centuries, wars over fertile ground seem more likely than specialized global supply chains.
Think of many extinction events this planet had previously. Up to 90% of life died.
However, humanity needs to pay more respect to the habitats of the native species. But for a few dollars people easily looks the other way, unfortunately.
We'll be fine without corals, polar bears and with half rainforests.
Harsh weather events are coming, but we will be fine.
Forestwise:
> Since the end of the last ice age — 10,000 years ago — the world has lost one-third of its forests [0]
> Half of the global forest loss occurred between 8,000 BCE and 1900; the other half was lost in the last century alone. [0]
Good news: rich countries forest are in growing again in a U curve. Bad news: those countries also imports more wood than ever.
Coral polypes are habitats for many other species that some humans depends.
Honey comes from a farm animal, the honey bee, that is out competing other native animals, and has all the fun problems of a monoculture.
We step over dollar bills to pick up pennies, and it’s very hard to get red pilled out of it.
At the time, there was a single sprig of milkweed near my mailbox. Since then, the milkweed has exploded.
I can't bring myself to trim it back, because every time I look at the milkweed I think of my mother's statement. Of course, it's magical thinking on my part.
I guess I'm trying to say that, at least for me, it's been more pleasant to entertain these ideas as comforting fantasy, and I don't think that small personal allowance has eroded my more practical abilities elsewhere. Not struggling so much against this kind of thinking has freed me in a certain way.
Definitely go ahead, this is a great thing to do! Just positng this as a hint :)
Where I live, feral honeybees are an extremely damaging invasive species, causing huge declines in both native pollinators (by taking their food) and native birds (by taking their nest sites).
Feral honeybees also threaten domestic honeybees by spreading diseases. Up until recently, we were 100% free of verroa mites, but now they are spreading through feral populations and will cause major population losses of domestic bees.
Now I have no bloody idea whether or not anything he's come up with has been independently validated (and I really should) but his claims (at least at the time) were that the nectar derived from a number of different mushrooms reduced viral load in bees by a staggering amount across a number of significant viruses.
Including the deformed wing virus - which is exactly what it sounds like.
The virus not only limits how efficiently and thus how far a bee can fly, it limits how long they can do it for.
They live short and die young.
This majorly constrains the hives in two very significant ways:
A reduced grazing radius: a bee that can only go half as far only has access to one quarter the food supply.
A bee that dies young needs to be replaced early, so the hive gets hungrier.
Increased needs and reduced resources kills the hive.
Last year was a drought but we had plenty of monarchs. This year's been extremely wet, and there are extremely few monarchs, consistent with the observation of the article. We've had plenty of swallowtails, fritillaries, and red admirals, though.
Translated: "Could people please do it for free (so the government don't need to move a finger?".
Not always. People can design (and should design) more natural gardens. Just because is nice, save energy and will improve their lives. But gardeners can't stop chemicals to enter their gardens, specially if they live near a farm. Pesticides will not respect the borders of a garden or a natural park.
Only the government can force people to use chemicals in a more sensible way. A "war for better control of chemicals that kill people" would save animals but most probably alleviate also a lot the obesity epidemic and save a lot of healthcare money. Several birds for one shoot.
The problem is that politicians don't want to pass those laws. They know that they would be viciously attacked and called "socialists", "hippy fairies" or "against the American way". Unfortunately the benefits will not be visible until an lot of time on "politician's years" scale.
Our system doesn't know what to do with land that isn't directly economically productive but I bet a lot of farmers would choose a "farm" that requires almost no effort and money to maintain for like 40% of what they would have got growing corn.
And politicians do like their money but it’s not fundamentally so frivolous. You can try to not get millions in funding from some industry or other but good look in the election when the other candidates invests hundreds of thousands in attack ads against you. Which you won’t be able to do even if you wanted to because you have no money. Politicians are greedy and corrupt but that’s because the system selects for that.
Ultimately you can say that the ppl do not want change hard enough to dedicate hours a week to work for the issues that you so easily list in a comment and then dismiss as impossible because ppl apparently do not want it. But that’s not a revealed preference for the status quo. You cannot make that conclusion.
I have never seen a Monarch caterpillar around here in the five years I've lived here. I don't think host plant availability is the problem here.
In an opposite situation: when I planted Pearly Everlasting the thing was eaten the ground by (non-Monarch) caterpillars. A bit too much of a good thing! It survived, thankfully.
Maybe we could go totalitarian world government. Or put facebook in charge. I dunno. Somehow take away everybody's freedom to digest everything within reach.
It would certainly reduce the incessant grinding effect that we have upon the world. Choke the volcano of pollution and ecosystem destruction.
That would save many butterflies, and other of our co-earthlings too.
2. Harder: Go out at night, pick up the snails, walk 1 mile away, deposit snails. Snails will find their way back if they are relatively close to where you are so you have to go to an unfamiliar place
It is just not helpful to think like that and to address problems as if each one is an existential threat.
That's actually part of the problem with climate change.
Our calories don't come from pollinated crops.
Hope that lowers your stress levels a bit.
Curves don't feel like they're slowing down and I do agree the peak is north of where we are, but there is a peak coming, and a decline the other side.
Japan, China, Korea are all ahead of trend. Australia too but it's masked by immigration. Developing economies with high birthrates especially rural see huge declines with increases in local economy, opportunity.
Probably one of those 80/20 relationships, where 20% of the population is consuming 80%, so if you reduce total population, but there is still plenty of population that can pick up the slack of consumption, then peak population won’t be the beginning or the downward trend.