7 comments

  • 1659447091 56 minutes ago
    >> 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...

    • JCBird1012 47 minutes ago
      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)

  • sholladay 5 minutes ago
    Stop planting butterfly bushes! It’s a trap. Instead, plant milkweed. Support their entire lifecycle.

    The names of these plants ought to be changed.

  • tastyfreeze 1 hour ago
    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.

    • downboots 1 hour ago
      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-...
    • nomel 44 minutes ago
      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.
    • ceejayoz 1 hour ago
      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.

      • _heimdall 1 hour ago
        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.

      • NewJazz 23 minutes ago
        Mosquito dunks and clear standing or pooling water.
    • micromacrofoot 1 hour ago
      it is not love, we need to make it unprofitable

      homeowners have nothing on farms, acres and acres of pesticides and monocultures

      • fooqux 53 minutes ago
        > 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. :/

  • tabbytown 1 hour ago
    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.
  • fooqux 1 hour ago
    I wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
    • dqv 19 minutes ago
      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.

    • jihadjihad 49 minutes ago
      > 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...

    • tmoertel 47 minutes ago
      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/

  • kleton 1 hour ago
    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
    • tempaccount5050 29 minutes ago
      Maybe not directly, but they definitely care about property value which gets you municipal codes requiring you to mow your lawn or get fined.
    • Octoth0rpe 26 minutes ago
      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.
  • atlasagentsuite 1 hour ago
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