Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

There may not be "time enough" for some species that are rapidly declining.

What's going on? 

Butterfly guru Arthur Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology,  will speak on butterflies and the insect apocalypse at the third annual Butterfly Summit, an all-day event that begins 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 27 at Annie's Annuals and Perennials, 740 Market Ave., Richmond. Free and family friendly, it's co-sponsored by the Pollinator Posse, a Bay Area-based volunteer group co-founded by Tora Rocha and Terry Smith.

Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California since 1972 and maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu. A member of the UC Davis faculty since 1971 and author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, he has studied a total of 163 species in his transect. His is the largest and oldest such dataset in North America.

Shapiro,  who will address the summit at 11 a.m., is frequently quoted in the regional, national and international news media, including BBC, New York Times and the Washington Post. He was recently interviewed on the National Public Radio Program, Insight with Beth Ruyak, on "Butterflies as Heralds of the Apocalypse." He recently addressed a monarch butterfly summit at UC Davis at which he declared that "California monarchs are on life support." (See his presentation.)

Tora Rocha, co-founder of Pollinator Posse

10 a.m.: Bring the kids to see our caterpillars and adult butterflies, talk with our experts and share your experiences.

11 a.m.: Where have all the insects gone? Art Shapiro of UC Davis will share his thoughts on the insect apocalypse happening around the globe and will discuss the state of insects and butterflies in Northern California.

1 p.m.: Angela Laws, monarch ecologist from Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and Mia Monroe, volunteer, will discuss how your gardening practices can help the plight of the California monarchs

All day: Stop by the regional information tables to learn about what you can do to help re-establish butterfly populations.

Pollinator Posse: Tara Rocha and Terry Smith, along with Jackie Salas, horticulturist at Children's Fairyland, Oakland, will be available for questions.

Andy Liu: A landscape architect and garden designer specializing in butterfly habitat, Liu will explain why his neighborhood is alive with Swallowtails, Gulf Fritillaries and many other winged wonders.   

Tim Wong: He is known as known as the "Pipevine Swallowtail Whisperer." Wong an aquatic biologist at the California Academy of Sciences.

Andrea Hurd: Hurd, with the Mariposa Garden Design, will share her methods for designing meadows for butterflies. She specializes in songbird, butterfly, and pollinator habitat gardens using California native and pollinator-friendly plants.

Robin North: North, a garden designer specializing in pollinator and songbird habitat gardens in the North Bay, will share ideas for designing Sonoma County habitat gardens. 

Suzanne Clarke:  Clarke, a Sonoma County Master Gardener and "Butterfly Whisperer," will show how to rear caterpillars at her table and discuss the benefits of gardening for habitat.

Alameda County Master Gardeners:  They will be on hand to show how to garden for native pollinators.

What is the Pollinator Posse? It's a group formed in Oakland in 2013 to create pollinator-friendly landscaping in urban settings and to foster appreciation of local ecosystems through outreach, education and direct action, said Rocha, a retired Oakland parks supervisor.  "With eco-friendly landscape techniques at the heart of our work, we teach respect for the creatures which keep Oakland– and the world– blooming."

"We envision a day when life-enhancing, thought-inspiring green spaces will grace every corner of the city and the world beyond," she said.

The Pollinator Posse (see their Facebook page) is heavily into not only butterflies, but all pollinators. "Individuals and groups with separate distinguished achievements in the fields of entomology, horticulture, education, public works and volunteer engagement saw the challenge and opportunity of sustaining the indispensable work of pollinators by expanding habitat and awareness," said Rocha. "A generous gift of $10,000 from our founding sponsor, Clif Bar, launched Posse programs which have established acres of pollinator habitat; maintained existing habitat; and offered outreach and education to Oakland communities.

Their latest events include:

• A Tees for Bees at the Chabot Golf Course (filming for Tora Rocha's Jefferson Award)
• A Tee for Bees at the Redwood Canyon Golf Course (see images on Facebook)
• Sponsorship of a native pollinator garden and installation of three small "AirBeeNBees"at the Forgotten Soldier Community Garden in Auburn (See media coverage)

The Pollinator Posse will be a sponsor at the Forgotten Soldier's Earth Day celebration and will be helping youngsters create their own mini "AirBeeNBees."

Another highlight:  the Pollinator Posse will be participating in the third annual California Honey Festival on Saturday, May 4 in downtown Woodland. This is co-sponsored by the City of Woodland the the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center.  

If you've ever wanted to converse with butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, about "butterflies and the  apocalypse" and sip a beer (or another beverage) at the bar at the same time, here's your chance.

The Davis Science Café has booked "A Conversation with Arthur Shapiro: Butterflies as Heralds of the Apocalypse" at 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 10 in the G Street Wunderbar, located at 228 G St., Davis. The event, hosted by professor Jared Shaw, professor and interim department chair of the UC Davis Department of Chemistry, is free and open to the public (but the refreshments  are not).

Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California since 1972. The 10 sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. The largest and oldest database in North America, it was recently cited by British conservation biologist Chris Thomas in a worldwide study of insect biomass.

A monarch, Danaus plexippus, nectaring on Mexican sunflower, Tithonia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

What's going on with the butterflies?

The overwintering western population of the monarch butterfly on the central California coast declined 86 percent last winter,  the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation indicates on its website. "Working at a conservation nonprofit means that we often come across bad news, but the results from this winter's Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count left us shocked: an all-time record low of 28,429 monarchs at 213 sites. This number is an 86% drop from the previous count done at Thanksgiving 2017, when 192,668 monarchs were counted at 263 sites (comparing only the sites monitored in both years)—and a dizzying 99.4% decline from the numbers present in the 1980s (Schultz et al. 2017). In short, only one of every 160 monarchs present in the 1980s exists today."

At the 2018 Butterfly Summit at Annie's Annuals and Perennials in Richmond, Shapiro told the crowd that "The vast majority of the butterflies we monitor are emerging earlier in the year now than they were in the 1970s."

His research shows that not only are butterflies coming out earlier, but "we also find trends in population and species richness."

Shapiro, a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1971 and author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, said that "in a nutshell, at low elevations, butterfly faunas have been declining slowly until 1999. In 1999, 17 species had an abrupt fall in abundance, spontaneously. On its face, this was a non-random event. The decline was then rapid from 1999 to the onset of the recent drought and then things went up again."

Science Café, initially supported by the National Science Foundation, is currently supported by the Department of Chemistry and Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and promoted by Capital Science Communicators.

Science Café sessions are hosted the second Wednesday of each month.  Topics so far this year? Plant ecologist Mark Schwartz of the UC Davis Department Environmental Sciences and Policy held forth at the March session on "Does California Have a Wildfire Problem? Can It Be Fixed?"  The February session featured Professor Roland Faller of the UC Davis Department of Chemical Engineering on "Using Computers to Understand Materials: From Proteins to Semiconductors" while Professor Denis Marcellin-Little of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine's Surgical and Radiological Sciences discussed "Don't Try That at Home; High-End 3D Printing in Orthopedic Surgery" at the January session.

So it's butterflies and the apocalypse on April 10. Ask your questions, sip an adult beverage (or another beverage) and enjoy the evening!

It's good to see butterflies, especially monarchs, getting so much press.

Now let's see if we can press the issue.

The Washington Post just published an article in its style section: "Butterflies Were Symbols of Rebirth. Then They Started Disappearing,"  chronicling the history--as we know it--of butterflies. For his in-depth piece, reporter Dan Zak interviewed butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, who has monitored the butterfly population in Central California since 1972 and maintains a research website.

The Washington Post reporter mentioned the monarch butterfly summit held Feb. 28 in the Putah Creek Lodge, UC Davis, where invited guests of the Environmental Defense Fund discussed  "Recovering the Western Monarch Butterfly Population: Identifying Opportunities for Scaling Monarch Habitat in California's Central Valley." 

How serious is it?  "The latest population surveys indicate that monarchs overwintering on the central coast have declined 86% since last winter and now total 0.5% of their historical average," according to the agenda.

Shapiro, one of the speakers, delivered a presentation on  "What We Don't Know and What We Know That Ain't So About Monarchs" in which he declared that "monarchs are on life support in California, and we are reduced to prescribing placebos." (See Bug Squad blog.) "I never saw a single wild Monarch larva in 2018—the first time since I became butterfly-aware in 4th or 5th grade!" he said.

In his Washington Post piece, published March 6, Zak wrote: "There's compelling evidence that pesticides, deforestation and habitat loss are to blame for monarch decline. Climate change sharpens every threat by altering weather patterns, extending droughts, strengthening storms. It's easy to conclude, then, that we are responsible....Shapiro says we don't fully understand what's happening to butterflies, but he can't shake a feeling of responsibility."

 “I feel like a doctor who has a patient he's known his entire life, and the patient is obviously dying, and the doctor and his colleagues have been unable to determine why — so they can't recommend treatments,” Shapiro told the reporter.  “It's a level of frustration where I'm watching things that I love go away, and there's nothing I can do about it but just stand there.”

We experienced that a little of that level of frustration last year in our pollinator garden in Vacaville. We saw--and reared--only 10 caterpillars in 2018. Compare that to 2016 when we reared and released more than 60 monarchs.

 In 2016,  we'd commonly see seven or eight at any given time all day long in the late summer and early fall. They'd stop for some flight fuel before winging it over to the California coast to overwinter. On Labor Day, 2016, we photographed a tagged migratory monarch from Ashland, Ore. nectaring in our garden. It was part of a citizen science project conducted by Washington State University entomologist David James.

Very few migratory monarchs fluttered into our garden in 2018. Where are all the monarchs? Something indeed was--and is--happening.

"For thousands of years, humans have looked to butterflies as a reassuring symbol in times of change," Zak wrote. "The Earth now is changing, and butterflies have become a symbol of something else: loss."

As Shapiro said in his presentation in the Putah Creek Lodge: 

• Consider a doctor faced with a patient in rapid decline. All tests have failed to identify the cause. What is the doctor to do? You can't prescribe treatment for an undiagnosed illness, can you? You can make a wild stab at a prescription on the basis that the patient is going to die anyway, and MAYBE, just maybe, this drug will do some good. Or you can prescribe a placebo, just to reassure the patient that you are doing something. That's where things get interesting. Occasionally a patient improves drastically on a placebo. Maybe he would have improved anyway; there's no way of knowing. Suppose our patient has a complete remission despite having received only a placebo. Does our doctor convince himself the placebo cured him?
  
  As of right now, the Monarch is on life support in California, and we are reduced to prescribing placebos. If our patient comes back from the brink—as history suggests it may well—will we convince ourselves that our placebos worked? Probably. And that's not how to do science. That's what philosophers call the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
  
  We can do can do better than that!

 Meanwhile, Shapiro will be teaching a UC Davis graduate student course, "The Science of the Monarch Butterfly," on Tuesday nights, starting April 2, during the spring quarter. The course is set for 8:10 to 10 p.m. every Tuesday in Room 2342 in Storer Hall, located off Kleiber Hall Drive.   He's inviting citizen scientists or others interested in the science of the monarchs to audit the course, for free. No reservations are required.

In between the rains today, we saw them.

So beautiful!  Painted ladies, Vanessa cardui, nectaring in patches of colorful wildflowers in the Biological Orchard and Gardens (BOG), located behind the Mann Laboratory on University of California, Davis campus.

The migratory butterflies, passing through California on their way to the Pacific Northwest, stopped there for some flight fuel: sipping nectar from tidy tips, Layia platyglossa; five-spot, Nemophila maculate, and blue lupine, Lupinus.

They've been in the national news a lot, these butterflies, as has butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology. Known for his expertise on all things butterfly, he's monitored the butterfly population of Central California since 1972 and maintains a research website.

Yes, it's been a big year for painted ladies, thanks to the heavy rainfall and super blooms in the deserts near the Mexican border.  And, as Shapiro says, tremendous wildflower blooms are typically great years for the painted ladies.

New York Times reporter Julia Jacobs interviewed Shapiro for her March 17th piece, in which she marveled that millions of the painted ladies are migrating. Shapiro told her: "The striking thing is they're moving very rapidly and directionallly. So it's almost like being in a hail of bullets.”

Rita LeRoy or "Farmer Rita," the self-described "Farm Keeper" on the Loma Vista Farm, Vallejo, part of the Vallejo City Unified School District, saw the butterflies passing through the farm on Monday, March 17. Her description is fabulous:

"They came through Vallejo on Monday," she said. "Art's description was right on. It was like being in a hail of bullets. This was because they were flying so low and it was a constant stream, like standing in the middle of a 500 lane expressway. I kept telling the students, 'Look! Another, another, another...' The path was at least as wide as the farm which is about 200 yards. When I stood in one spot, I would agree they were passing within my vision (about 100') at about 1 every second. They rarely stopped to nectar but were flying in a very direct NE direction when they came through the farm. They flew through nonstop from before 1 p.m. and the flow started to dwindle around 4 p.m. Still enough at that point to show the after school kids. They didn't fly in huddled groups or clouds and they moved fast. I tried taking a video but it was like a bad remake of The Blair Witch Project, with unfocused, whiplash camera moves of uncertain objects since they are so small in the overall background. I'm so glad Art saw them."

Today (Wednesday) we didn't see the hail of bullets, but we did see about a dozen of them grabbing some flight fuel on the UC Davis campus over a 10-minute period.

If you get a chance, check out the Biological Orchard and Gardens. A 24,000-square-foot garden, located behind the Mann lab, off Kleiber Hall Drive, it's planted with several dozen species of heritage fruit trees, and landscaped with flower gardens. The painted ladies are elsewhere on campus, too, including the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden.