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Milkweed, only food source for monarch caterpillars, ubiquitously contaminated:
New evidence identifies 64 pesticide residues in milkweed, the main food for monarch butterflies in the west. Milkweed samples from all of the locations studied in California's Central Valley were contaminated with pesticides, sometimes at levels harmful to monarchs and other insects.
The study raises alarms for remaining western monarchs, a population already at a precariously small size. Over the last few decades their overwintering numbers have plummeted to less than 1% of the population size than in the 1980s—which is a critically low level.
[...] "We expected to find some pesticides in these plants, but we were rather surprised by the depth and extent of the contamination," said Matt Forister, a butterfly expert, biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno and co-author of the paper. "From roadsides, from yards, from wildlife refuges, even from plants bought at stores—doesn't matter from where—it's all loaded with chemicals. We have previously suggested that pesticides are involved in the decline of low elevation butterflies in California, but the ubiquity and diversity of pesticides we found in these milkweeds was a surprise."
[...] While this is only a first look at the possible risks these pesticides pose to western monarchs, the findings indicate the troubling reality that key breeding grounds for western monarchs are contaminated with pesticides at harmful levels.
"One might expect to see sad looking, droopy plants that are full of pesticides, but they are all big beautiful looking plants, with the pesticides hiding in plain sight," Forister, who has been a professor int he University's College of Science since 2008, said.
Journal Reference
Halsch, Christopher A., Code, Aimee, Hoyle, Sarah M., et al. Pesticide Contamination of Milkweeds Across the Agricultural, Urban, and Open Spaces of Low-Elevation Northern California, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2020.00162)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:07PM (15 children)
Some organisms (like shellfish) collect and concentrate garbage from the environment. In a clean environment it's a good strategy for getting every last bit of available food. In a poisonous environment it's a good strategy for making yourself poisonous to things that might eat you. The milkweed genome has no incentive (from the last few million years of evolution) to make itself food for monarch caterpillars.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FunkyLich on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:22PM (8 children)
Yet, it is way too fast (30-40 years) for that same genome of milkweed, to suddenly acquire traits similar to that for shellfish - again a result of millions of years of evolution - as an aid of keeping predators away. How can you miss out on something for millions of years and then suddenly catch up within 40 years?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:31PM (1 child)
Americans evolve 3-10 times during their life. Drinking bleach helps them to.
How else do you think they stay the fittest, at the top of the food chain?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:11PM
Bacon and cheeseburgers. Atkins diet.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:02PM
I'm going to go with: milkweed was so ridiculously successful it didn't have to worry about monarch predation. The filter feeder thing was just there - maybe for the collection of nutrients advantage - our pesticides just "stepped in it" and the monarchs, relying on a monoculture foodsource, are paying the price.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:13PM
Unless it had those traits all along.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:55PM (2 children)
During the industrialization of England squirrels that had been brown suddenly evolved to be black, to better camouflage themselves in settings that were coated with coal dust. That happened in short time because the squirrels don't live that long.
Geneticists use fruit flies to study DNA for a similar reason, because they don't live long at all so you don't have to wait long to see the effects of your experiment.
I don't know what the life span of a milkweed plant is, but if it's short enough it's possible to acquire new traits in a short time (relative to a human time frame).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @01:08AM
The prevalence of darker colored animals and insects increased relative to lighter colored ones due to decreased predation of the more camouflaged. The color variations already existed. Moths are the thing I've always heard as the example. With coal pollution turning everything black and grey, the black moths which were previously a small proportion were more successful at evading predators than the white ones, and thus their genes became more prevalent. When the environment finally became cleaner (still horribly polluted, just less visibly so), the proportions began to return to the old where white was the majority.
Evolution of a new color or entirely novel trait takes *many* generations.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday June 10 2020, @01:12AM
Actually I think there was always a mixed population of brown and black squirrels, with the black being rare until the industrial revolution and then the brown becoming rare. Natural selection in action but not recent mutation.
There is a mosquito that has actually evolved into a new species that inhabits the London underground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:12PM
Change is very rarely gradual. As other posters said, the ability could have always been there, and simply wasn't used, perhaps was activated through some epigenetic trigger, and now has spread. Or could also be a random mutation, either way it provides a tremendous advantage and would definitely become mainstream quickly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:28PM
European mushrooms collect and concentrate Cs137 [www.bfs.de], which stops humans from eating them. Damn clever, those mushrooms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:20PM (1 child)
I'd extend your remarks with plants don't have a fast circulatory system or excretion system like animals, so once its sprayed with something that doesn't oxidize or photo-dissociate in UV or otherwise is persistent, its just not going away.
Animals at least slowly pee out lead and other heavy metals, strange organic chemicals. Maybe too slowly sometimes but at least the rate isn't near zero.
Mammal livers pretty much laugh at Carbaryl compounds and wipe it out of the blood about as well as alcohol. It has nothing chemically to do with alcohol but mammal livers perform "about as well" on it as alcohol. Mammals can withstand pretty similar dose percentages before death like a large fraction of a percent. On the other hand plants can't get rid of it at all so after application it sits around for weeks, which is great if you're killing pests and bad if its killing other non-pests. And insect brains have no defensive mammal liver so bugs rapidly croak. Of course being broad spectrum has its problems so its been banned in a lot of countries because it kills most everything but birds and mammals for a long time after application.
I haven't bothered to read the story but wouldn't be surprised to read its about Carbaryl and its zillions of consumer marketed versions or any similar pesticide.
Broad spectrum and persistent is always going to sell well to people not trying to feed bugs, and will also be problematic to someone sometimes, for the same reasons.
Really the solution is to promote and subsidize non-persistent pesticides and expand the industry vastly to treat everything all the time multiple times, but nothing is about rational science now, everything is about who can be the shittiest virtue signaller, so the fact that the best thing for the environment AND butterflies would be increasing pesticide use (of shorter persistence pesticides) is just not going to sell at protest marches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:51PM
Carbaryl has been around forever. These declines have not. I would imagine it's a problem of newer pesticides.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday June 09 2020, @10:24PM (2 children)
Doesn't it? Monarchs visit and help pollinate many milkweed plants along their migrations. Unlike something like army worms or tent caterpillars (whatever produces them) they only lay a very few eggs on each plant and the caterpillars don't come close to defoliating and killing the host plant. It is a symbiotic relationship, and while it does seem to benefit the monarch more than the milkweed, I would not be surprised to find milkweeds starting to decline if monarchs become extinct.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 09 2020, @10:55PM
Point taken, and in years gone by when there were still billions of monarchs it probably did benefit the milkweed.
These days, milkweed probably gets more pollination from (slowly dying) commercial honey bees and other insects than it does monarchs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Wednesday June 10 2020, @01:26AM
Actually, according to wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias#Milkweed_flowers [wikipedia.org], the flowers complex design works better for large-bodied hymenopterans (bees, wasps etc) when it comes to pollinating with butterflies not being good milkweed pollinators.