6 comments

  • 1659447091 37 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 28 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)

  • 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.

    • nomel 24 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.
    • downboots 44 minutes ago
      We'll hopefully look back at these like we now see asbestos. For all our scientific advancement it seems myopic.
    • ceejayoz 48 minutes 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.

      • NewJazz 3 minutes ago
        [delayed]
      • _heimdall 46 minutes 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.

    • 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 34 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 40 minutes ago
    I wish clover lawns would at least make a comeback. Still extremely hard to find seed for it though.
  • 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
    • Octoth0rpe 6 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.
    • tempaccount5050 10 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.
  • atlasagentsuite 53 minutes ago
    [dead]