Can we stop the decline of monarch butterflies and other pollinators?

My wife really loves Monarchs so we have planted a garden of milkweed and butterfly bushes. Monarchs will lay their eggs and then we make sure the caterpillars are doing well and have plenty of food. When they reach 5th instar and look for a place to turn into a chrysalis, we put them in a mesh enclosure to keep them safe and then release them once they emerge as butterflies!

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 :)

My wife called our city hall to see if we could let a small patch of grass grow tall in our backyard for insect support. They said a "pollinator garden" was highly encouraged, so we did. Last June we saw more lightening bugs then ever before.

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.

I've been planting milkweed for monarchs. We just had 4 hatch today! Another 11 in their chrysalis and 12 hungry little caterpillars.

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!

It‘s interesting how the impact of roads and traffic on our insect population is always ignored in these discussions. Neither the article nor any of the top comments mentions it.

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.

As a reformed bee-keeper, I've come to understand that it is the native pollinators that really matter. Monarchs and other native pollinators do most of the work. Except in exceptional (and artificial) situations (like almonds in Ca), domesticate bees mostly get in the way.

However, I will add all the "helpful pest control contractors" who want to kill every insect on my property probably don't help.

My take away from the article, as with most articles which utilize a question as a title, is "No".

At least not as long as we continue to allow the agriculture industry to blanket a not-insignificant portion of the earth with glyphosate.

One of the biggest contributors to pollinator decline is loss of habitat for native bees. Most bees are actually solitary (don’t live in hives) and live in little crannies or holes in the ground.

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!

https://scopabio.com/

The approach to the problem at this point seems to be relying on every day people to plant things in their backyard, which seems ultimately too minor to be impactful.

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.

No.

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.

When my mom was in her last week, she told my sister she'd come back as butterflies. (Of course, I don't believe in that.)

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've started keeping my own chemical-free bees. My hope is to build a healthy apiary of local bees that casts swarms, which will help replenish the wild bee population around me.

One thing that seems interesting to me is Paul Stamets' work around mushroom nectar.

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.

Wasn’t there some guy in Mexico trying to do this and the mafia murdered him or something?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51488262

I see a lot of local pollinators here. Because we're beekeeper as a hobby, I do worry about honey bees out-competing local pollinators, though I have not noticed any fewer local pollinators since we started. In fact, I rarely see our honey bees on our flowers -- they seem to prefer to go out foraging in the direction that we've pointed their hive entrances, which is towards another property. What I might do next Spring is start doing a weekly local pollinator census so that in the next couple of years we might notice if there is a noticeable change in their population.

I have seen one monarch butterfly this year, I remember when I was a kid I would reliably she flocks of them so thick you could spot them from a mile off. The massive drop in biodiversity is terrifying.

I have a summer home on 38 acres of hardwood forest and prairie in southwest Wisconsin. We keep it basically as a nature preserve for birds and butterflies.

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.

Yes, by transplanting biomes. Climate changes the world, but plants are slow when it comes to travelling to where the new home is. Sp food sources "vannish". But if you move a biome piece towards the new home that is climatewise its old, you stabilize that transition.

You can plant all the milkweed you want, and it won't matter if we don't fix the climate first.

I see maybe 1-2 a year. I used to see them all the time when I was younger.

The biggest problems are monoculture agriculture (few places for milkweed to grow), and widespread use of insecticides (kill what few butterflies there are).

My wife and I started a native plant nursery (for Southern Wisconsin) this year for exactly this reason! Save the pollinators!

The answer is yes. Same as "Can we stop using lead on gasoline?". But the real question asked here (and in a lot of other cases) is if can be done --without the pain of allocating resources--

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.

Are they asking if we have the ability to, or is it in a stuck up way like “can you not”?.

We paved paradise and put up a parking lot. What do you expect to happen?

I mean we can... We can eat less animal food and cut down the farming areas used to grow food for them, we can ask politicians to ditch zoning, parking minimums, enforce more taxes on fossil vehicles, build better public transport, better bike infra and plant more trees and other vegetation for insect corridors. We can at least stop investing in fossil energy and redirect those $ on solar/wind/hydro/nuclear/geo. We can increase the taxes for car ownership to reduce it. But ultimately the question is will we? I don't think so. Ppl like their current lifestyle, politicians do like money from fossil industries and are invested in those. So...

Yes, reduce the human population.

I see common milkweed and swamp milkweed all over the place around here (upstate NY). I have swamp milkweed in my garden (deliberately planted, it's attractive; I prefer native plants.)

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.

If you mow your grass and spray herbicides and pesticides and buy non organic food you contribute to their decline.

Locally? Yes. Globally? No.

Dismantle the "rts for billionaires" that our society has become. 99% of our effort is wasted fighting each other (in "business" and otherwise). We don't need it.

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.

Can we also stop the hordes of big brown slimey snails destroying pretty much everything in my garden. Any pointers greatly appreciated. I mean i love animals, insects, birds and whatnot but these snails are just way out of order.

I feel like we're just one collapse away from unrecoverable scenario. And we just don't know which extinction will be the one that ends it all.

I wish we could stop the increase of humans.