I'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.
I 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!
>> 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.
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)
It 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.
Pesticides form the backbone of crop protection. Without them, we're looking at at least a 40% reduction in global yield, and much greater uncertainty in food supply chains (the oil shocks show how bad that can be). Pesticides per se are not the problem; synthetic broad-spectrum pesticides with many unintended effects are. They're often toxic to people and ecosystems, and resistance among pests and pathogens is increasing anyway, so their days are numbered to a degree. Biopesticides, which are generally safer and much more sustainable, offer a real solution to at least the safety issue.
I work on RNAi-based biopesticides (sprayed dsRNA) - non-GM, doesn't impact beneficial species, doesn't hang around in the environment, etc. Already ubiquitous in nature (and part of our diet). Peptide-based biopesticides are another approach that is going well. Both approaches are now commercialised by smaller players (e.g. for varroa mite control in bee hives by GreenLight), and not by the Bayer, Syngenta types.
This was my about reaction when I was renting a house and a guy was going door to door to get people to sign up for yard bug spraying. Wait the bugs are already outside and you want to kill them? That’s where they live.
Asbestos... Lead, CFCs, mercury, cadmium, radium, petroleum, DDT, BPA, microplastics, PFAS, organophosphates, pyrethrins... The more wonder materials turn out to be devastating for human health or environmental stability, the more I think maybe the "no (synthetic) chemicals" crowd have a point.
Or rather, that maybe we're learning the wrong lesson each time. Maybe instead of "asbestos is bad" or "DDT is bad", the real lesson should have been "biological and ecological systems are incredibly fragile outside of the exact combination of environmental conditions and chemical inputs they've specifically evolved to handle".
Too much complexity, too many delicate mechanisms and feedback loops. Can't afford to keep playing whack-a-mole, every generation we replace the old poisons and add some new ones. If we keep introducing new molecules and quantities of substances that evolution hasn't had a chance to adapt to, then we shouldn't be surprised that we keep breaking things.
But let's not pretend we don't use pesticides for a reason. People gotta eat, and pyrethrins are already an improvement AFAIU, less toxic to mammals, similar to molecules that exist in nature. But still, a cudgel. Maybe we need to take ecological engineering seriously, control pest species by simultaneously cultivating stable ecosystems of insectivores/predators and hyperparasites, poison spray not required...
This stopped working in the mid-Atlantic when invasive tiger mosquitoes arrived. They need like a bottle cap sized amount of water so even things like a flower can hold enough water for them to reproduce.
We’re using scented lures which have the right salt + lipid combo to attract mosquitoes. It helps but I still wish Nathan Myrvold had seriously developed that “photonic fence” product.
I think the next best thing is an automatic turret that fires salt bullets or something, maybe AI. Hopefully it doesn't take an eye out, but if it took out like 1million mosquitoes for 1 eye, worth it?
I 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Oh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
Gen 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
I 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.
I 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.
I'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.
The “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.
I'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.
This 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.
I 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!
>> 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://swmonarchs.org/ProjectMonarch.php
https://celltracktech.com/pages/project-monarch-press-releas...
A related project, but for birds - 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)
It 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.
Pesticides form the backbone of crop protection. Without them, we're looking at at least a 40% reduction in global yield, and much greater uncertainty in food supply chains (the oil shocks show how bad that can be). Pesticides per se are not the problem; synthetic broad-spectrum pesticides with many unintended effects are. They're often toxic to people and ecosystems, and resistance among pests and pathogens is increasing anyway, so their days are numbered to a degree. Biopesticides, which are generally safer and much more sustainable, offer a real solution to at least the safety issue.
I work on RNAi-based biopesticides (sprayed dsRNA) - non-GM, doesn't impact beneficial species, doesn't hang around in the environment, etc. Already ubiquitous in nature (and part of our diet). Peptide-based biopesticides are another approach that is going well. Both approaches are now commercialised by smaller players (e.g. for varroa mite control in bee hives by GreenLight), and not by the Bayer, Syngenta types.
I had a salesman come to our place saying that a neighbor had spiders, so their whole backyard was treated! I laughed and shut the door.
This was my about reaction when I was renting a house and a guy was going door to door to get people to sign up for yard bug spraying. Wait the bugs are already outside and you want to kill them? That’s where they live.
We'll hopefully look back at these like we now see asbestos. All our scientific advancement doesn't automatically cure myopia. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/how-...
Asbestos... Lead, CFCs, mercury, cadmium, radium, petroleum, DDT, BPA, microplastics, PFAS, organophosphates, pyrethrins... The more wonder materials turn out to be devastating for human health or environmental stability, the more I think maybe the "no (synthetic) chemicals" crowd have a point.
Or rather, that maybe we're learning the wrong lesson each time. Maybe instead of "asbestos is bad" or "DDT is bad", the real lesson should have been "biological and ecological systems are incredibly fragile outside of the exact combination of environmental conditions and chemical inputs they've specifically evolved to handle".
Too much complexity, too many delicate mechanisms and feedback loops. Can't afford to keep playing whack-a-mole, every generation we replace the old poisons and add some new ones. If we keep introducing new molecules and quantities of substances that evolution hasn't had a chance to adapt to, then we shouldn't be surprised that we keep breaking things.
But let's not pretend we don't use pesticides for a reason. People gotta eat, and pyrethrins are already an improvement AFAIU, less toxic to mammals, similar to molecules that exist in nature. But still, a cudgel. Maybe we need to take ecological engineering seriously, control pest species by simultaneously cultivating stable ecosystems of insectivores/predators and hyperparasites, poison spray not required...
Zero chance. There is too much to be made by killing everything to love about life for us not to do it
We 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.
Yep, 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.
Mosquito dunks and clear standing or pooling water.
This stopped working in the mid-Atlantic when invasive tiger mosquitoes arrived. They need like a bottle cap sized amount of water so even things like a flower can hold enough water for them to reproduce.
We’re using scented lures which have the right salt + lipid combo to attract mosquitoes. It helps but I still wish Nathan Myrvold had seriously developed that “photonic fence” product.
I think the next best thing is an automatic turret that fires salt bullets or something, maybe AI. Hopefully it doesn't take an eye out, but if it took out like 1million mosquitoes for 1 eye, worth it?
I think you would run out of eyes before running out of mosquitos.
There’s a swamp near us and a bunch of neighbors.
it is not love, we need to make it unprofitable
homeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures
> 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. :/
yeah exactly, it can be done but it's harder and more expensive (though likely not as expensive as meat industry subsidies)
I 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.
In decline ? Really ? Come take the dozens of passionflower butterflys away from my yard whose caterpillars are gnawing my plants to the ground !
I 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.
I wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
> 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-ze...
Dutch 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+...
https://www.ernstseed.com/product/white-clover-dutch/
I 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.
You can get alternative bulk mowable native lawn substitute seeds from the Thomas Payne Foundation.
Oh, do you perhaps mean Theodore Payne Foundation at https://theodorepayne.org/ ? I was just searching Thomas Payne Foundation and that was what came up
We need the poison we spray through the entire environment to kill only non-beautiful insects.
Startup opportunity, anyone?
Gen 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
I 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.
On 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.
I 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.
Maybe not directly, but they definitely care about property value which gets you municipal codes requiring you to mow your lawn or get fined.
Stop planting butterfly bushes! It’s a trap. Instead, plant milkweed. Support their entire lifecycle.
The names of these plants ought to be changed.
I'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.
You should only be planting native species whatever they are for your specific area.
The “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.
Pesticides... messing up everything from butterflies to human colon cells at the moment.