(Press-News.org) Western butterfly populations are declining at an estimated rate of 1.6% per year, according to a new report to be published this week in Science. The report looks at more than 450 butterfly species, including the western monarch, whose latest population count revealed a 99.9% decline since the 1980s.
"The monarch population that winters along the West Coast plummeted from several hundred thousand just a few years ago to fewer than 2,000 this past year," said Katy Prudic, an assistant professor of citizen and data science in the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment and a co-author of the report. "Essentially, the western monarch is on the brink of extinction, but what's most unsettling is they are situated in the middle of the pack, so to speak, in our list of declining butterfly species."
Declining population groups include butterflies that typically thrive in disturbed and degraded habitats, such as the cabbage white, or Pieris rapae, as well as species with broad migration ranges, such as the West Coast lady, or Vanessa annabella.
The research team sourced more than 40 years of data collected by both expert and community scientists across the western United States to identify the most influential drivers in butterfly declines.
"When we talk about global change, it's often hard to tease out climate and land use change because they are happening simultaneously," Prudic said.
"Our report is unique in covering a wide area of relatively undeveloped land as compared to, for example, studies from heavily populated areas of western Europe," said Matthew Forister, a biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and lead author of the article. "The fact that declines are observed across the undeveloped spaces of the western U.S. means that we cannot assume that insects are OK out there far from direct human influence. And that's because the influence of climate change is, of course, not geographically restricted."
The takeaway, Prudic said, is western U.S. butterflies are declining quickly, and autumn warming - not spring warming or land use change - is an important contributor to the decline.
Fall is the New ... Warm
When it comes to seasonal warming, spring gets a lot of attention, but the warming climate affects temperatures year-round. Fall warming trends have been observed in 230 cities across the U.S., with the greatest fall temperature increases found in much of the Southwest.
"In Arizona, for example, the period between September and November has warmed about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1895," said Michael Crimmins, a professor and climate science extension specialist in the UArizona Department of Environmental Science. "Fall temperatures have warmed especially fast since the late 1980s and it's not clear why."
Declining butterfly populations have been observed in areas experiencing these fall warming trends across the West, according to the report. The authors suggest fall temperature increases may not only induce physiological stress on butterflies but may influence development and hibernation preparation. Warmer fall temperatures can also reduce the availability of food or host plants, and extend the length of time butterflies' natural enemies are active.
What's a Butterfly to Do?
In response to recent climate warming, one species in the eastern U.S. has taken flight. In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution this week, researchers show an unusually rapid northward shift for the swallowtail butterfly, Papilio cresphontes.
Over the course of 18 years, the swallowtail butterfly moved 324 kilometers north; that rate of expansion is more than 27 times faster than the average organism.
"Butterflies are pretty mobile. The swallowtails we worked on are more on the mobile side of things," said Keaton Wilson, who completed his postdoctoral research in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and is the lead author on the swallowtail article. "The tricky thing is they can move north, but they're really restricted by their host plants, or what the caterpillar larvae feed on. So, they can fly farther north, but they can't really hang out long without something for their young to eat."
Both reports suggest butterflies are struggling to adapt to the changing climate, in urban as well as wild spaces. Conservation, management and restoration of public lands, especially in cooler riparian areas, will be critical to preventing further butterfly declines and extinction, Prudic said. However, it can't be assumed that protection of wild spaces without careful management is enough to stem the tide, she said.
"What we can do better is develop lands and gather resources we need more sustainably and with more sensitivity to conservation," said William Mannan, a conservation biologist in the UArizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Mannan points to creative strategies aimed at creating systems of connectivity and minimizing ecological impact, such as overhead power distribution and conservation plans that direct development away from areas of high biodiversity.
Wet urban places, such as botanical gardens and restoration projects like Tucson's Santa Cruz River Heritage Project, are going to be more important than ever, Prudic said.
"Urban areas that have constant water flow are going to be critical refuges moving forward and likely areas of higher butterfly concentration," she said.
"The widespread butterfly declines highlight the importance of careful management of the lands that we do have control over, including our own backyards where we should use fewer pesticides and choose plants for landscapes that benefit local insects," Forister said.
INFORMATION:
How best to evaluate the performance of a group testing strategy for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which involves pooling samples from multiple individuals in order to conduct a single RT-PCR test on the whole group? To do precisely that, scientists from the CNRS, l'université Grenoble Alpes, and l'université Sorbonne Paris Nord1 have developed a model that evaluates the efficiency of such tests. Their theoretical study accounts for both dilution effect and the detection limits of the RT-PCR test, in an effort to assess the number of potential false negatives based on pooled sample size, to optimize group size thereby minimizing epidemic risk, and finally to more accurately determine ...
The research group presents its findings in the current issue of the journal Science.
When the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated in 1889, it was considered a technical marvel. Its artful and delicate arrangement of large and small iron girders provided extraordinary stability and made sure it became the world's tallest building at the time by a long shot. "Hierarchical" is what experts call the engineering approach of an open array of larger beams braced by smaller ones. For several years now, material science researchers have tried to transfer this efficient approach to the internal microstructure of materials, for example by using 3D printers that can replicate engineering truss ...
During the past 25 years astronomers have discovered a wide variety of exoplanets, made of rock, ice and gas, thanks to the construction of astronomical instruments designed specifically for planet searches. Also, using a combination of different observing techniques they have been able to determine a large numher of masses, sizes, and hence densities of the planets, which helps them to estimate their internal composition and raising the number of planets which have been discovered outside the Solar System.
However, to study the atmospheres of the rocky planets, which would made it possible to characterize fully those exoplanets which are similar to Earth, is extremely difficult with currently available ...
Forager ants do it, vampire bats do it, guppies do it, and mandrills do it. Long before humans learned about and started "social distancing due to COVID-19," animals in nature intuitively practiced social distancing when one of their own became sick.
In a new review published in Science, Dana Hawley, a professor of biological sciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin, University of Bristol, University of Texas at San Antonio, and University of Connecticut have highlighted just a few of the many non-human species that practice social distancing, as well as lessons learned from their methods to stop the spread ...
Commercially available gene tests that shed light on individual's origins are popular. They provide an estimate of the geographic regions where one's ancestors come from. To arrive at such an estimate, the genetic information of an individual is compared to information pertaining to reference groups collected from around the world.
The findings now made by researchers from the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare make it possible, for the first time, to make similar comparisons within Finland.
A research group at the University ...
Many cognitive neurodevelopmental disorders are a result of too many or too few copies of certain genes or chromosomes. To date, no treatment options exist for this class of disorders. MECP2 duplication syndrome (MDS) is one such disorder that primarily affects boys and results from a duplication spanning the methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MECP2) locus located on the X chromosome.
A preclinical study published from the laboratory of Dr. Huda Zoghbi, professor at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital, provides experimental evidence that supports the use of antisense oligonucleotides as a feasible strategy to treat MDS. The study also offers crucial ...
Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85% of the matter in the observable Universe. Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity, a new paper published in EPJ C, by Gerson Otto Ludwig, National Institute for Space Research, Brazil, suggests that if this is substituted with a general relativity-based model, the need to recourse to dark ...
The drug nusinersen is approved for the treatment of 5q spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now examined in an early benefit assessment whether the drug offers an added benefit for patients in comparison with the appropriate comparator therapy.
According to the findings, there is an indication of a major added benefit in comparison with best supportive care (BSC) in children with early onset of disease (in the first six months of life). The drug manufacturer did not submit any relevant data for children with a later onset of disease, so that an added benefit in comparison with BSC is not proven here. For infants who are not yet symptomatic but are expected to have early onset ...
In recent years, researchers have begun using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) not just for better understanding the neural bases of psychiatric illness, but also for experimental treatment of depression, ADHD, anxiety, PTSD, substance use disorder, and schizophrenia with a technique called real-time fMRI neurofeedback.
While rtfMRI-NF has emerged in recent years as a promising experimental intervention, it's also a costly procedure that requires extensive technical setup to allow for real-time analysis. That's why a quantitative data review was overdue.
A team of END ...
Texas A&M University researchers have recently shown superior performance of a new oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) alloy they developed for use in both fission and fusion reactors.
Dr. Lin Shao, professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, worked alongside research scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Hokkaido University to create the next generation of high-performance ODS alloys, and so far they are some of the strongest and best-developed metals in the field.
ODS alloys consist of a combination of metals interspersed with small, nanometer-sized oxide particles and are known for their high creep resistance. This means that as temperatures rise, the materials keep ...
