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!

An insect (fly family) in amber in the paleontology collection in the Earth and Physical Sciences Building. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Those were just a few of the offering at the sixth annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day, held Saturday, Feb. 18. More than 3000 visitors checked out the offerings.

The free family-friendly, science-based event, held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., showcased 12 museums collections, said Biodiversity Museum Day coordinator Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology.

"It was a real community effort and we were happy to see the people coming to campus to learn about science and the collections," Yang said. Despite the threat of rain, it never occurred.

The Bohart Museum alone drew nearly 1700 people during its four-hour open house, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

All 12 collections were within walking distance on campus except for the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road and the California Raptor Center on Old Davis Road.

The following were open--some from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and others staggered from noon to 4 p.m.:

Anthropology Museum, Young Hall
Arboretum and Public Garden, headquartered on LaRue Road
Bohart Museum of Entomology, Academic Surge Building
Botanical Conservatory, greenhouses along Kleiber Hall Drive
California Raptor Center, Old Davis Road
Center for Plant Diversity, Sciences Lab Building
Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, Bee Biology Road
Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Academic Surge Building
Nematode Collection, Sciences Lab Building
Paleontology Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building
Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building
Viticulture and Enology Culture Collection, Earth and Physical Sciences Building

Committee members are already gearing up for the seventh annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day. The event traditionally takes place in February.

Meanwhile, many of the same collections will be open during the much larger 103rd annual UC Davis Picnic Day on Saturday, April 22.  The family friendly event is "free for all to come and experience the richness of diversity and achievement at UC Davis and the surrounding community in the areas of research, teaching, service and campus life," according to the Picnic Day website. "More than 200 events will take place throughout campus and will include exhibits, shows, competitions, demonstrations, entertainment, animal and athletic events, Student Organization Fair, Children's Discovery Fair, parade and much more."

Art Shapiro

Reporter Lizzie Wade, Science's Latin America correspondent based in Mexico City, led with: "It started with the best of intentions. When evidence emerged that monarch butterflies were losing the milkweed they depend on due to the spread of herbicide-resistant crops in the United States, people across the country took action, planting milkweed in their own gardens. But a new paper shows that well-meaning gardeners might actually be endangering the butterflies' iconic migration to Mexico. That's because people have been planting the wrong species of milkweed, thereby increasing the odds of monarchs becoming infected with a crippling parasite."

Wade pointed out that "tropical milkweed—at least when planted in warm environments like southern Texas and the U.S. Gulf Coast—doesn't die back in the winter like native milkweed does. When presented with a place to lay their eggs year-round, many monarchs don't bother making the trip to Mexico at all."  Some think the year-round tropical milkweed is "an even more direct threat to the butterflies. Milkweed hosts a protozoan parasite called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE). As caterpillars, monarchs ingest the parasite along with their normal milkweed meals, and when they hatch from their chrysalises they are covered in spores."

She quoted a butterfly scientist as saying that infected monarchs are much weaker than their healthy counterparts and don't live nearly as long. And if an OE-infected monarch tries to migrate, it will probably die long before it arrives in central Mexico, she wrote.

Shapiro has been monitoring and studying populations of butterflies in central California for more than four decades and posts the information on his website. In an email response to inquiries from a UC Master Gardener and Farm Advisor (initially sent my way), wrote:  “The story is basically correct, but there has to be more to it. Monarchs are normally in 'reproductive diapause' in winter, which means their sex organs and sex drive are inactive; this condition (as in migratory birds) is believed to be induced by seasonal day-length changes. We never used to get attempted winter breeding. Tropical milkweed has been in gardens in California for decades, but only very recently are we seeing attempted winter breeding, first in Southern California and now in the Bay Area. Many of us would like to understand why these animals are NOT in diapause! There have been unexplained changes in the seasonal geography of monarch breeding: for example, here in the Sacramento Valley, there is now virtually no spring breeding (as before) but tons of fall breeding (which didn't use to happen; the animals migrating coastwise were generally in reproductive diapause)."

The reference to OE is correct, Shapiro said. "However, there is an easy 'fix' that nobody talks about for some reason: just cut the plants to the ground a few times a year. This will encourage new growth, which will be cleaner, prettier, more nutritious, and uncontaminated with OE. There is nothing inherently 'bad' about winter breeding if it's clean. Infected winter breeding is a population sink. The animals are often too feeble to fly, and may be unable to expand their wings. But perfectly healthy ones are being produced right now in the East Bay on clean plants."

Many of the public comments that people posted about the research, Shapiro said, show a large amount of ignorance.  “Observation: the commonest eastern (Asclepias syriaca complex) and Californian (A. fascicularis) milkweeds are usually almost if not quite non-toxic, which means the monarchs that feed on them will be edible to birds. If you want to breed monarchs as bird food, by all means plant those! But if you want to breed nasty monarchs that will make birds vomit and never try one again, plant one of the more toxic species! There is no good evidence that the females discriminate between high-and low-cardenolide milkweeds, or that larvae do better on one than on the other. There is no garden equivalent of "one size fits all." You want to use species that make sense where you are located! That's what gardening 'zones' are there for...The genus Asclepias extends south to Argentina (the s-most species, A. mellodora, is the major host of the South American Monarch, Danaus erippus) so yes, there are milkweeds in Mexico…. There are so many resources readily available, but people are lazy, don't know how to search properly, or prefer to create their own 'facts' a la Fox News...it gets discouraging. God bless Master Gardeners and Farm Advisers!”

Stay tuned!

The times, they change. Standard textbook knowledge, that can change, too.

It did today.

For several decades,  few people challenged "the hump-shaped model" developed in the early 1970s by British ecologist Philip Grime who proposed that the number of species rises, then declines with increasing productivity.

Today an international team of 58 ecologists announced that habitat productivity does not predict the diversity of plant species, as previously assumed for several decades.

The groundbreaking research, to be published Sept. 23 in the journal Science (the embargo lifted today at 2 p.m., Eastern Standard Time) shows  “no clear relationship between productivity and the number of plant species in small study plots,” said Utah State University plant ecologist Peter Adler, lead author of the paper.

The ecologists sampled 48 diverse grassland sites on five continents in an innovative, unprecedented project partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The abstract:

For more than 30 years, the relationship between net primary productivity and species richness has generated intense debate in ecology about the processes regulating local diversity. The original view, which is still widely accepted, holds that the relationship is hump-shaped, with richness first rising and then declining with increasing productivity. Although recent meta-analyses questioned the generality of hump-shaped patterns, these syntheses have been criticized for failing to account for methodological differences among studies. We addressed such concerns by conducting standardized sampling in 48 herbaceous-dominated plant communities on five continents. We found no clear relationship between productivity and fine-scale richness within sites, within regions, or across the globe. Ecologists should focus on fresh, mechanistic approaches to understanding the multivariate links between productivity and richness.

The paper in Science is one of the first to emerge from the research, launched five years ago when the ecologists formed the Nutrient Network or “NutNet,” a cooperative research initiative dedicated to investigating biodiversity and ecosystem processes in global grasslands.

University of Minnesota researchers Elizabeth Borer and Eric Seabloom received funding from NSF to coordinate the network research. NSF also funds an annual meeting workshop in Minneapolis, where the researchers gather to analyze data.

Among the 58 ecologists participating:  Louie Yang, assistant professor of entomology at UC Davis.

When asked about the research, Yang commented:  “It’s a really innovative approach to ecology. We conducted a coordinated study in diverse grasslands at the 48 sites and we pooled our data together to address some persistent issues in the field. In this paper, we show that plant diversity is not predicted by productivity in any general or simple way; instead, it looks like patterns of plant diversity result from more complex processes which are variable at local, regional and global scales.”

Yang’s research contributions to the network came from a field site at the Sagehen Creek Field Station, located near Truckee in Nevada County. He and Dan Gruner of the University of Maryland have managed a montane or highland meadows site (elevation 6500 feet) since 2007 for their research.

And how did the ecologists measure productivity? Yang talks about this on the UC Davis Department of Entomology website. You'll also want to read what Michael Willig of the University of Connecticut has to say about the paper:  Perspective on Biodiversity and Productivity.

Willig begins with: "Researchers predict that human activities—especially landscape modification and climate change—will have a considerable impact on the distribution and abundance of species at local, regional, and global scales in the 21st century."

Meanwhile, we're anxiously awaiting more published research from the Nutrient Network.