Show Comments (
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
‘Absolutely Magical’: Southern California Sees Largest Painted Lady Migration Since 2005
Painted Ladies feeding near Thousand Palms, California as part of a massive migration north. David McNew / Getty Images
Southern California is in the midst of a "magical" surprise: unusually large swarms of Painted Lady butterflies filling the skies from San Diego to Pasadena.
"Everyone was posting about the butterflies all over Instagram," a woman told CBS Los Angeles Tuesday. "I saw so many, it was kinda like a swarm of them. It was pretty insane."
The butterflies are passing through as part of their yearly migration from the deserts of Southeast California to the Pacific Northwest, but this year they are doing so in numbers not seen since 2005, when they totaled around one billion.
"When they are scarce nobody notices them," University of California (UC) Davis ecologist Art Shapiro told The Los Angeles Times. "When they are abundant, everyone notices."
For Shapiro, who has been monitoring California's butterflies for almost 50 years, it's a welcome change. He only counted 25,200 Painted Ladies in 2018, down from 315,997 the year before, an alarming trend in a state that is seeing butterfly populations decline across the board.
But this year, that trend has reversed and then some.
"They were flying parallel to me, just bobbing along as I rode past the date palms," The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens Conservation Director James Danoff-Burg told The Los Angeles Times. "It was absolutely magical. I felt like a Disney princess."
The reason for the population's explosion has been California's unusually wet winter.
"The average annual rainfall in the Coachella Valley is 3 inches," Danoff-Burg said. "This year, we had 3½ inches on Valentine's Day alone."
The rain led to a desert wildflower bloom, giving the caterpillars more to eat and a greater chance of surviving. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, for example, has reported excellent wildflower viewing this year, NBC News reported.
However, the Painted Lady rebound doesn't necessarily mean that other California butterflies will recover.
"They are a boom-bust species," University of Nevada, Reno ecologist Matt Forister told The Los Angeles Times. "In some ways, they are the most successful butterflies on the planet."
California's overall butterfly population reached historic lows in 2018. A monarch butterfly count found numbers of the iconic species were down 85 percent compared to the year before, and Forister said at least 20 other species were declining even faster than the monarch.
Scientists think land use and farming changes that lead to less open space and fewer butterfly-friendly plants, an increased use of pesticides and climate change could all be contributing to a decrease in butterflies.
"There is not one cause for the butterfly decline — that's not how population extinction happens," Forister said. "It's more likely a suite of factors that are pushing on all these species."
Painted Ladies, though, are tough.
"They can pace cars at 25 miles per hour," Shapiro told NBC News.
The butterflies travel north for as long as their fat reserves will take them, then pause to breed. The next generation continues the trip. The butterflies then migrate back south in the winter.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Global Banks, Led by JPMorgan Chase, Invested $1.9 Trillion in Fossil Fuels Since Paris Climate Pact
11h
JPMorgan Chase building in New York City. Ben Sutherland / CC BY 2.0
By Sharon Kelly
A report published Wednesday names the banks that have played the biggest recent role in funding fossil fuel projects, finding that since 2016, immediately following the Paris agreement's adoption, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing climate-changing projects worldwide.
Read More
Show Less
Sponsored
Sriram Madhusoodanan of Corporate Accountability speaking on conflict of interest demand of the People's Demands at a defining action launching the Demands at COP24. Corporate Accountability
By Patti Lynn
2018 was a groundbreaking year in the public conversation about climate change. Last February, The New York Times reported that a record percentage of Americans now believe that climate change is caused by humans, and there was a 20 percentage point rise in "the number of Americans who say they worry 'a great deal' about climate change."
Read More
Show Less
The head of England's Environment Agency has urged people to stop watering their lawns as a climate-induced water shortage looms. Pexels
England faces an "existential threat" if it does not change how it manages its water, the head of the country's Environment Agency warned Tuesday.
Read More
Show Less
Trending
Pexels
By Jessica Corbett
A new analysis revealed Tuesday that over the past two decades heat records across the U.S. have been broken twice as often as cold ones—underscoring experts' warnings about the increasingly dangerous consequences of failing to dramatically curb planet-warming emissions.
Read More
Show Less
Sponsored
A flock of parrots in Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. ~dgies / Flickr
By Madison Dapcevich
Ask any resident of San Francisco about the waterfront parrots, and they will surely tell you a story of red-faced conures squawking or dive-bombing between building peaks. Ask a team of researchers from the University of Georgia, however, and they will tell you of a mysterious string of neurological poisonings impacting the naturalized flock for decades.
Read More
Show Less
Trending
Fire burns in the North Santiam State Recreational Area on March 19. Oregon Department of Forestry
An early-season wildfire near Lyons, Oregon burned 60 acres and forced dozens of homes to evacuate Tuesday evening, the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) said, as KTVZ reported.
The initial cause of the fire was not yet known, but it has been driven by the strong wind and jumped the North Santiam River, The Salem Statesman Journal reported. As of Tuesday night, it threatened around 35 homes and 30 buildings, and was 20 percent contained.
Read More
Show Less
Edwin Hardeman is the plaintiff in the first U.S. federal trial claiming that Roundup causes cancer. NOAH BERGER / AFP / Getty Images
A second U.S. jury has ruled that Roundup causes cancer.
The unanimous verdict was announced Tuesday in San Francisco in the first federal case to be brought against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, alleging that repeated use of the company's glyphosate-containing weedkiller caused the plaintiff's cancer. Seventy-year-old Edwin Hardeman of Santa Rosa, California said he used Roundup for almost 30 years on his properties before developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The decision comes less than a year after a jury awarded $289 million to Bay-area groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson over similar claims. The amount was later reduced to $78 million.
"Today's verdict reinforces what another jury found last year, and what scientists with the state of California and the World Health Organization have concluded: Glyphosate causes cancer in people," Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook said in a statement. "As similar lawsuits mount, the evidence will grow that Roundup is not safe, and that the company has tried to cover it up."
Judge Vince Chhabria has split Hardeman's trial into two phases. The first, decided Tuesday, focused exclusively on whether or not Roundup use caused the plaintiff's cancer. The second, to begin Wednesday, will assess if Bayer is liable for damages.
"We are disappointed with the jury's initial decision, but we continue to believe firmly that the science confirms glyphosate-based herbicides do not cause cancer," Bayer spokesman Dan Childs said in a statement reported by The Guardian. "We are confident the evidence in phase two will show that Monsanto's conduct has been appropriate and the company should not be liable for Mr. Hardeman's cancer."
Some legal experts said that Chhabria's decision to split the trial was beneficial to Bayer, Reuters reported. The company had complained that the jury in Johnson's case had been distracted by the lawyers' claims that Monsanto had sought to mislead scientists and the public about Roundup's safety.
However, a remark made by Chhabria during the trial and reported by The Guardian was blatantly critical of the company.
"Although the evidence that Roundup causes cancer is quite equivocal, there is strong evidence from which a jury could conclude that Monsanto does not particularly care whether its product is in fact giving people cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concerns about the issue," he said.
Many regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have ruled that glyphosate is safe for humans, but the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer found it was "probably carcinogenic to humans" in 2015. A university study earlier this year found that glyphosate use increased cancer risk by as much as 41 percent.
Hardeman's lawyers Jennifer Moore and Aimee Wagstaff said they would now reveal Monsanto's efforts to mislead the public about the safety of its product.
"Now we can focus on the evidence that Monsanto has not taken a responsible, objective approach to the safety of Roundup," they wrote in a statement reported by The Guardian.
Hardeman's case is considered a "bellwether" trial for the more than 760 glyphosate cases Chhabria is hearing. In total, there are around 11,200 such lawsuits pending in the U.S., according to Reuters.
University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told Reuters that Tuesday's decision showed that the verdict in Johnson's case was not "an aberration," and could possibly predict how future juries in the thousands of pending cases would respond.
Related Articles Around the Web