We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies. It’s a Revelation.

The New York Times ^ | Nov. 17, 2025 | Dan Fagin, Jonathan Corum

[Red6]

My wife mentions that occasionally. She’s seen it.

I’d love to see that one day.

[Red6]

Is the polar bear meme real, or just funny?

[Dr. Sivana]

Give me the metric system any day.

Use your metric system when measuring your nanometers on modern chips.

I'll use metric for buying fish at the fishmonger when hectograms instead of grams or decimals of a kilogram because they cannot remember anything smaller than a factor of 1,000 for everyday weights. I'll take a pre-enlightenment system based on how people really live, than based on "the distance that light travels in a vacuum in exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second at mean sea level."

If they had to come up with an utterly arbitrary system (outside of celsius), why couldn't they make it base 12, so we can have quarters and thirds divide nicely?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

You probably did but were sabotaged by spellcheck.

[Carry_Okie]

I am trying to bring in native plants as I find them.

Annuals are the hard part, and the most important to diverse insect life. Even tiny weeds can suppress native annual germination. If you have that problem I may be able to share what I've done to make it happen, but it takes considerable time to learn visually distinguish native germination from weed seedlings. FRmail me if you have questions.

[NonValueAdded]

Of course, given the way butterflies fly, a one-mile trip covers a distance of 5.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It is both real and funny.

The polar bear population is indeed growing.

[FamiliarFace]

I used a habitat in August/September to help house Monarch caterpillars during a cold spell. I had 35 caterpillars and 31 successfully emerged from their chrysalises and flew away. It was a fascinating experience.

[Salamander]

Maryland decided to plant milkweed in the median strips of I70, which seemed like a brilliant idea.

However, they somehow did not foresee what would happen when newly emerged Monarchs flew out of the median strips straight into interstate traffic.

It was horrible.

[Fury]

Amazing this summer watching the high number of fireflies over the front meadow (used to be a lawn) vs adjacent areas that were mowed. A three acre meadow had over 4,000 fireflies as estimated by an entomologist that did a survey.

The non-native species that we focus on in the ornithology research area I maintain is Common Teasel. It fragments medians where ground nesting birds frequent. Since 2018 we’ve hand cut or pulled over 73,000 plants with over 15,000 in 2025. It’s spread primarily by improper late season mowing. In doing an off-season survey, the number of teasel basal rosettes that are wintering over is at a six year low. There’s several species of milkweed in the area and we do not disturb those as a general rule.