We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies (nytimes.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline.
The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.
Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."
The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.
Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."
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Then he'll get HHS to put some scientists to work on changing monarch genetics so they'll come gold.
Re: No Kings (Score:2)
A little paint from Home Depot is all the White House staff has in their budget
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Listen to your chieftain's health advisories, "there's so much liquid" the babes are literally drowning in it while getting autistic.
The Commies did one thing right, they had drier vaccines.
Therefore almost no risk of baby drowning, and 120% less autism.
Re: Neat achievement. (Score:2)
The US is going to fall behind in tech if we can't keep our autism numbers up.
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Probably so, but ask yourself, is your ability to construct technological terrors justifiable in the face of all those babylives lost to vaccines and abortions?
Ask yourself and answer with a prayer!
Found the answer (Score:2)
Are these hypothetical babies likely to vote Republican?
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Of course, if indoctrinated properly in the Only True and Orthodox Christian Fundamentalist Truth as Preached from the Great Balls Room of the New and Improved White House.
new conspiracy theory (Score:1)
Butterflies Aren't Real
who wrote this crap (Score:3)
> by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.
wtf?
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Exactly. Came here to say this. I suspect a bunch of people didn't edit or proof this and the originator is a lazy thief and used an LLM bot.
20mg tracker on a 600mg butterfly? Why not say it's a 60kg person carrying a 2kg backpack? That's meaningful and it's not much at all.
Americans can do anything... (Score:2)
...but you can't make us understand the metric system.
BTW, what is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen monarch butterfly? In furlongs per fortnight, please.
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...but you can't make us understand the metric system.
BTW, what is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen monarch butterfly? In furlongs per fortnight, please.
How odd. I haven't had a non-metric car since the late 80's. My whole shop is metric. I work in metric. So many of us here in the USA do.
But I also have the old school tools as well. I make parts on my metric lathe that are measured in inches. I make parts that are metric on one side and standard on the other.
Getting a rageboner about this whole thing is silly, It is just different sizes. But it seems to enrage some eurocentrics.
And acting like Americans are stupid isn't much of a flex when you ca
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You left out....
How wonderful it is to have multiple languages, yet somehow not so wonderful not to have multiple measurement systems.
Honestly. I don't understand why the rest of the world goes all apeshit about how things in the U.S. are measured. I mean, who fucking cares? Hell, I LIVE HERE and don't fucking care.
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You left out....
How wonderful it is to have multiple languages, yet somehow not so wonderful not to have multiple measurement systems.
Honestly. I don't understand why the rest of the world goes all apeshit about how things in the U.S. are measured. I mean, who fucking cares? Hell, I LIVE HERE and don't fucking care.
Here is the place to watch them go nuclear, a European physicist telling the truth about our superiors,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].
Oh heck - I'm here Q. what is the difference between countries that use Metric and US type measurements? A. One of them landed men on the moon, and returned them. The other never did.
Oh heck - did they know, the Metre, the standard of the universe, is measured by a fraction? Not even an SI unit, but a fraction. I'll be at -1 troll any moment now - the Truth u
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...but you can't make us understand the metric system.
BTW, what is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen monarch butterfly? In furlongs per fortnight, please.
Canada officially adopted the metric system 55 years ago. We still use both imperial and metric in daily lives. Ask a person of their height or weight, many will respond with feet, inches, and pounds. Long distances may be described in miles or kilometers. Certain items such as drill bits are almost exclusively in fractions of an inch. Temperature is in Celsius but we intuitively understand Fahrenheit. Volumes are in litres but we're somewhat comfortable with pints and cups. Gallons get a bit murky because
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My thoughts exactly.
They should have said it was the equivalent of 0.00005 basketballs floating on top of 0.0000004 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Much easier to understand.
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> by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.
wtf?
Somebody took a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG toke on the bong before writing that up.
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Really. The proper comparison is the Library of Congress carrying the New York Public library.
Interesting choice (Score:1)
Not who or what I would choose to track, but whatever floats your boat I guess.
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Not who or what I would choose to track, but whatever floats your boat I guess.
In my area, the number of monarchs has been crazy this year compared to the last few. As an amateur nature photographer, it's been quite fun. While I'm not an expert in the field and can't say exactly how this information will help butterfly research, it's still pretty impressive for both naturalism and technology.
Also better butterflies than people, if they're tracking anyone against their wills.
Half raisins? Grains of uncooked rice? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a better way to visualize the weight.
The tag weighs about 1/10 the weight of the butterfly. So in human terms, it would be like carrying around a Thanksgiving turkey, or a couple of gallons of milk.
It will be interesting to see if these transmitters alter the flight of these butterflies.
Re:Half raisins? Grains of uncooked rice? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Insects are a lot stronger than humans, relative to their weight. This may be simply because of the size difference or a combination of size and materials. If you double the size of a butterfly, its weight will increase by a factor of 8, but the surface of its wings will increase only by a factor of 4.
Using a visualization of raisins and grains of rice is better than using humans. A picture of the device attached on a butterfly might be even better.
I just put a bunch of raisins on my kitchen scale, and they average 200 mg each, so Jonathan's raisins must be about six times bigger than mine. I'll weigh my grains of rice later.
Re: Half raisins? Grains of uncooked rice? Really? (Score:1)
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Insects are a lot stronger than humans, relative to their weight. This may be simply because of the size difference or a combination of size and materials.
If you double the size of a butterfly, its weight will increase by a factor of 8, but the surface of its wings will increase only by a factor of 4.
Using a visualization of raisins and grains of rice is better than using humans. A picture of the device attached on a butterfly might be even better.
I just put a bunch of raisins on my kitchen scale, and they average 200 mg each, so Jonathan's raisins must be about six times bigger than mine. I'll weigh my grains of rice later.
How many fractions of a Library of Congress are we actually talking about?
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While it's true that insects are very strong relative to their weight, this "enormous" strength applies to weight being lifted while on the ground. For example, while ants can carry up to 50 times their body weight, https://www.terminix.com/ants/... [terminix.com]. bumblebees can only carry up to 80% of their body weight while flying. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curios... [ucdavis.edu]
I don't know exactly how that translates to butterflies, or whether that 60 mg radio tag will be a problem for them while flying. But it still would require
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It must surely matter how the weight is attached and distributed too, I'm sure a bee could not carry 80% of its weight as a point load on one leg. The adhesive might also mess with the animal.
I suspect all the scientists will find out is that 3 grains of rice are enough to mess with the flight dynamics of a monarch butterfly. If it was no big deal I suspect nature would have already made the butterflies bigger
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Of course they will blame all the dying butterflies on some imaginary virus, or parasite, or basically anything other than actual cause.
You're right. Scientists are ill-equipped to figure out that ~400 specific butterflies died out of 200,000 is due to a transmitter and are instead left fabricating a cause. But an Internet anonymous coward is up to the task. Sure.
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Of course they will blame all the dying butterflies on some imaginary virus, or parasite, or basically anything other than actual cause.
You're right. Scientists are ill-equipped to figure out that ~400 specific butterflies died out of 200,000 is due to a transmitter and are instead left fabricating a cause. But an Internet anonymous coward is up to the task. Sure.
Had to get clear down here to find an on-topic post, what with the TDS people and even a metric uber alles posting.
The plight of the monarch is very interesting. That we can track individual's movements is even more amazing.
A few years back, there was a large concern about habitat/milkweed loss. One response was people planting milkweed in their back yards.Here in the Pennsylvania mountains, gas lines often run along back roads. Some people have taken to trowing milkweed seeds along the easement, prov
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Of course they will blame all the dying butterflies on some imaginary virus, or parasite, or basically anything other than actual cause.
You're right. Scientists are ill-equipped to figure out that ~400 specific butterflies died out of 200,000 is due to a transmitter and are instead left fabricating a cause. But an Internet anonymous coward is up to the task. Sure.
Had to get clear down here to find an on-topic post, what with the TDS people and even a metric uber alles posting.
The plight of the monarch is very interesting. That we can track individual's movements is even more amazing.
A few years back, there was a large concern about habitat/milkweed loss. One response was people planting milkweed in their back yards.Here in the Pennsylvania mountains, gas lines often run along back roads. Some people have taken to trowing milkweed seeds along the easement, providing a many miles long smorgasbord for the little critters. even heading the right direction (northeast/southwest)
Another strange point. I take the Cape May-Lewes Ferry pretty often, which traverses the Delaware Bay. I've seen Monarch butterflies catching a draft off the back of the ferry to cross the bay. That has to be a great energy saver.
Slashdot being Slashdot, I'll probably be modded offtopic for posting about Monarch Butterflies in a story about Monarch Butterflies
As it happens, I live near a major stopover in Ontario and almost 50 years ago I had a school field-trip to the provincial park they use. It was wild. I get it, we'd feel completely different if they weren't pretty, but... they are. It's shaming to think about what's happened to this very visible species and realize we've done it to countless others who don't happen to have massively visible orange and black wings.
I do understand environmentalism pushback. I mean... if we only occupied 1% of the world
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Just out of curiosity, how many butterflies do you figure the scientists can reasonably be expected to tag? Sometimes it helps to have a sense of proportion. Mathematics can help. Sociology would tie up the loose ends for you. So you needn't gets your knickers in a twist over this.
How would you feel... (Score:2)
if I stuck a tracker to your arse? Oh, wait. We already have oir mobiles on us all the time...
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if I stuck a tracker to your arse? Oh, wait. We already have oir mobiles on us all the time...
Better a tracker than a cam. Nobody needs to see that shit.
The scientist were amazed (Score:2)
Said one particular study author," this new technology is so impactful! We were so worried the additional mass might alter the future ef.s
" ##85 & & crtl *"
NO CARRIER
You can't hide! (Score:2)
Need more trackers (Score:2)
Individual monarchs are cool, but I'd really like tracking for the swarm. Witnessing the monarch migration is something people should experience.
10% of weight (Score:2)
If you put on an extra 10% of your weight, how do you think that would affect your ability to run a marathon?
Panopticon (Score:2)
They are just practicing on butterflies. You are next!
#QANON
And people were worried about AirTags (Score:2)
The only way to assure that you're not tracked is to make it so no one will want to track you