New ‘Detective Work’ on Butterfly Declines Reveals a Prime Suspect
New ‘Detective Work’ on Butterfly Declines Reveals a Prime Suspect
Agricultural insecticides were a key factor, according to a study focused on the Midwest, though researchers emphasized the importance of climate change and habitat loss.
The latest insight comes from a study on butterflies in the Midwest, published on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE. Its results don’t discount the serious effects of climate change and habitat loss on butterflies and other insects, but they indicate that agricultural insecticides exerted the biggest impact on the size and diversity of butterfly populations in the Midwest during the study period, 1998 to 2014.
This is one of those “no shit” things that Rachel Carson talked about in 1962.
Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that's designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring), https://archive.org/details/fp_Silent_Spring-Rachel_Carson-1962
Reactionary!
Butterfly Detective is an incredibly cool job to have, although the findings here are admittedly bad.
I'd watch a papillon noire.
She had antennae like black snakes, and right away I knew she was trouble.