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America’s butterflies are disappearing because of insecticides, climate change and habitat loss, with the number of the winged beauties down 22% since 2000, a new study finds.The first countrywide systematic analysis of butterfly abundance found that the number of butterflies in the Lower 48 states has been falling on average 1.3% a year since the turn of the century, with 114 species showing significant declines and only nine increasing, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.“Butterflies have been declining the last 20 years,” said study co-author Nick Haddad, an entomologist at Michigan State University. “And we don’t see any sign that that’s going to end.”A team of scientists combined 76,957 surveys from 35 monitoring programs and blended them for an apples-to-apples comparison and ended up counting 12.6 million butterflies over the decades. Last month an annual survey that looked just at monarch butterflies, which federal officials plan to put on the threatened species list, counted a nearly all-time low of fewer than 10,000, down from 1.2 million in 1997. Many of the species in decline fell by 40% or more. ‘Catastrophic and saddening’ loss over time David Wagner, a University of Connecticut entomologist who wasn’t part of the study, praised its scope. And he said while the annual rate of decline may not sound significant, it is “catastrophic and saddening” when compounded over time.“In just 30 or 40 years we are talking about losing half the butterflies (and other insect life) over a continent!” Wagner said in an email. “The tree of life is being denuded at unprecedented rates.”The United States has 650 butterfly species, but 96 species were so sparse they didn’t show up in the data and another 212 species weren’t found in sufficient number to calculate trends, said study lead author Collin Edwards, an ecologist and data scientist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.“I’m probably most worried about the species that couldn’t even be included in the analyses” because they were so rare, said University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Karen Oberhauser, who wasn’t part of the research.Haddad, who specializes in rare butterflies, said in recent years he has seen just two endangered St. Francis Satyr butterflies which only live on a bomb range at Fort Bragg in North Carolina “so it could be extinct.”Some well-known species had large drops. The red admiral, which is so calm it lands on people, is down 44% and the American lady butterfly, with two large eyespots on its back wings, decreased by 58%, Edwards said.Even the invasive white cabbage butterfly, “a species that is well adapted to invade the world,” according to Haddad, fell by 50%. “How can that be?” Haddad wondered. Butterfly decline as a warning sign for humans Cornell University butterfly expert Anurag Agrawal said he worries most about the future of a different species: Humans.“The loss of butterflies, parrots and porpoises is undoubtedly a bad sign for us, the ecosystems we need and the nature we enjoy,” Agrawal, who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email. “They are telling us that our continent’s health is not doing so well Butterflies are an ambassador for nature’s beauty, fragility and the interdependence of species. They have something to teach us.”Oberhauser said butterflies connect people with nature and that “calms us down, makes us healthier and happier and promotes learning.”What’s happening to butterflies in the United States is probably happening to other, less-studied insects across the continent and world, Wagner said. He said not only is this the most comprehensive butterfly study, but the most data-rich for any insect.Butterflies are also pollinators, though not as prominent as bees, and are a major source of pollination of the Texas cotton crop, Haddad said. Driest and warmest areas are worst for butterflies The biggest decrease in butterflies was in the Southwest Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma where the number of butterflies dropped by more than half in the 20 years.“It looks like the butterflies that are in dry and warm areas are doing particularly poorly,” Edwards said. “And that kind of captures a lot of the Southwest.”Edwards said when they looked at butterfly species that lived both in the hotter South and cooler North, the ones that did better were in the cooler areas.Climate change, habitat loss and insecticides tend to work together to weaken butterfly populations, Edwards and Haddad said. Of the three, it seems that insecticides are the biggest cause, based on previous research from the U.S. Midwest, Haddad said.“It makes sense because insecticide use has changed in dramatic ways in the time since our study started,” Haddad said.Habitats can be restored and so can butterflies, so there’s hope, Haddad said.“You can make changes in your backyard and in your neighborhood and in your state,” Haddad said. “That could really improve the situation for a lot of species.” Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer
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Fans of the beleaguered retail chain Big Lots will be happy to learn that the first locations to reopen after its bankruptcy last year are currently undergoing a cleaning, remodeling, and re-merchandising process. Their reopening, the first in a series of four waves of “soft openings,” is scheduled for next month. Heres what you need to know about when and where Big Lots stores will reopen. Big Lots ‘first wave’ locations Variety Wholesalers, the North Carolina-based retail company that has taken control of hundreds of the ailing retailer’s stores, has confirmed with Fast Company that it is gearing up to reopen some of the locations that it has acquired. As Fast Company previously reported, as many as 200 Big Lots stores were assigned to Variety Wholesalers as part of a deal with Gordon Brothers, the liquidation firm that took control of the retailer. The locations will reopen in four waves from April through early June. Fast Company has now learned that the first of those waves is underway. The first wave of Big Lots store reopenings will encompass nine stores in six states across the South. Those locations are: Kentucky 1342 Indian Mound Dr, Mount Sterling, KY Louisiana 755 Veterans Memorial Blvd, Metairie, LA Mississippi 2605 W Main St, Tupelo, MS 5778 Hwy 80 E, Pearl, MS North Carolina 1432 E Dixie Dr, Asheboro, NC Tennessee 1041 S Riverside Dr, Clarksville, TN 744 Nashville Pike, Gallatin, TN 220 Dickson Plaza Dr, Dickson, TN Virginia 2911 Hershberger Rd NW, Roanoke, VA Big Lots reopening date Jeff King, Variety Wholesalers vice president of sales and marketing, told Fast Company that the company began the necessary work on March 3 to reopen the locations. He confirmed that the nine locations listed above will have their soft openings on Thursday, April 10. The stores will remain closed for a period of time before then so Variety Wholesalers can perform necessary work, which includes cleaning the locations, as well as remodeling the stores and bringing in new categories of merchandise. King also confirmed plans for the second wave of Big Lots opening. He said that wave would include considerably more locationsanother 70 storesand that those stores would reopen on Thursday, May 1. Big Lots back from the brink Its fair to say that 2024 was the worst year in Big Lots’ 57-year history. After suffering financial difficulties for years, Big Lots announced in December that it would be going out of business and closing all remaining 870 locations, and thus seeing the elimination of 27,000 jobs. Gordon Brothers purchased Big Lots and had been managing the stores closures when, in the final days of 2024, Variety Wholesalers swooped in, agreeing to buy at least 200 locations from the liquidator to keep the chain going under the Big Lots brand. Variety is the owner of several other discount chain stores, including Roses, Bills Dollar Stores, Super Dollar, and Bargain Town. Other states besides the ones listed above that are expected to see Big Lots stores reopen include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
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Every morning, after Richard J. Davidson meditates, he opens his calendar and sets an intention for each meeting. He brings each person into his mind and heart, expresses gratitude for their work in the world, and considers how he can best support them. I was inspired to try this practice. I reflected on the people that I planned to see that day and chose one thing that Id like to thank them for. I was surprised that a simple “thank you” caused them to visibly light up. Davidson was right: It not only transformed our conversation, but the entire nature of my day. This is an example of microdosing well-being and its impact on ourselves and others. Its also the heart of Davidsons mission: Well-being doesnt need to be left up to chance. It is a skill that we can train. Richard Davidson in the lab, 1990 [Photo: David Nevala] When humans first evolved, none of us were brushing our teeth, he shares. Now, pretty much everyone on the planet brushes their teeth. Its not part of our genome. We’ve learned to do this because we consider it important for our physical hygiene. If we spend even as short of time as we do brushing our teeth nourishing our mind, our findings and the findings of other scientists show that this world would be a different place, he adds. Most people would consider their mind more important than their teeth. Yet, we don’t treat our mind with the same respect. As a world renowned neuroscientist, Davidson has devoted five decades to studying human flourishing. He is the founder and director of The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he conducts groundbreaking research on emotions and the brain, as well as meditation and contemplative practices. Through the Centers nonprofit, Healthy Minds Innovations, they translate their findings into evidence-based practices for individuals and organizations to cultivate well-being. In our conversation, he explains why our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the world are the product of the stories that we tell ourselves. He explains how to change your relationship to your thoughts, manage the activation of your stress response, and create structural changes in the wiring of your brain in as little as 20 hours. David Richardson [Photo: David Nevala] This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You shared that: our brains are constantly being shaped, wittingly or unwittingly. Most of the time, we are unaware of the forces around us that are shaping our brains and have very little control of those forces. The one thing that we do have control over is our own mind. Explain that last line, because we often dont think that we have control over our minds. Every human being is born with the capacity to control her or his mind. The fact that many people feel that they don’t have control over their mind is simply a symptom of the degradation in well-being that we are seeing in the world today. But, we know with absolute scientific certainty that we can harness our innate capacity and control our mind. Whats amazing is that it doesn’t take that much to get a taste of this capacity. You don’t have to sit in any special posture or travel to the Himalayas. You can do this anywhere, anytime. Its not just my opinion. Its the results of years of scientific research. When it comes to neuroplasticity, what is the neurological impact when we commit to well-being practices? What we know from existing scientific research is that when we commit to well-being practices, the brain changes in at least two basic ways: One is what we call functional changes, which are changes in the patterns of activation of different networks in the brain. The second is structural changes, where there’s literally changes in the wiring of the brain. We can see functional changes in the brain after just a few hours of practice. We can see structural changes after as little as 20 hours of practice. When you think about learning a new sport, language, or instrument, those complex skills require quite a bit of practice. It doesn’t take much with well-being, because humans are born to flourish. We have all these capabilities within us. You highlighted research findings that clearly suggest that people who are willing to question their own beliefs, and understand that their beliefs are not fixed, are less likely to be diagnosed with mental health disorders and more likely to respond positively to treatment. Explain this and how we can practice it. This is one of the core dimensions of our framework for understanding well-being. We call it Insight. Its the idea that every human being has a narrative that they tell about themselves. What’s really important for well-being is not so much to change the narrative, but to change our relationship to this narrative. So, being able to see the narrative as a constellation of beliefs, thoughts, and expectations that is not permanent. These thoughts can change. Theyre not all of who we are. Take pain as an example. We might say: I’m in pain. Does that mean all of me is in pain? Is there any part of me that’s not in pain? Who is the I when we say: “I am in pain?” Another strategy is, for a difficult situation at work or at home, we can ask ourselves: What might it be like for someone who has a different set of beliefs and expectations to be in the same situation? How might they perceive it? These are simple strategies to loosen the grip that the narative that we carry may have and to help us appreciate that we are not our thoughts. On the Healthy Minds Program app, an instructor explained that he shifted from using meditation to try to destroy his anxiety to learning to accept and befriend his inner demons. How can we learn to befriend ourselves? This is part of our DNA in terms of how we introduce these practices. Weve found, through the science weve done, that it is much more effective not to fight with your mind. There are some people who think: I’m going to meditate and get relaxed. I’m going to try to stop my distracting thoughts. It further increases their stress and agitation. Instead of having that approach, its much simpler to acknowledge that were human. We do have these distracting, sometimes upsetting, thoughts. So, rather than pushing them away, simply acknowledging them. We often use the analogy of the weather and the sky. You can have foreboding clouds. They will eventually go away. It doesn’t change the nature of the sky. The same is true with our thoughts and emotions. From the perspective that we are suggesting, our minds are pure in the same way that the sky is. But, there are all these clouds that come in. If we are able to look at them, as clouds in this waythey arise, change, and go away eventuallyit helps us to loosen the grip that they have. Another analogy is that instead of being in this turbulent river, we can step onto the shore, and watch the river go by; And, even appreciate its beauty, even if it’s turbulent. In The Dalai Lamas Guide to Happiness, Roshi Joan Halifax said that self-criticism only strengthens the self-hatred and self directed aggression. The thing that is going to transform it is not meanness, its love. What does self-compassion look like in action? Self-compassion is a way to think about love. Its accepting who we are with all of our imperfections, not pushing against it. To give a personal example, I’ve been meditating daily for 50 years. There are times when my morning practice will still be filled with distraction. I don’t get up from my meditation having a lot of self criticism about it. One of my teachers has this line that I love: The road to Lhasa goes up and down. What he meant is: The bad meditations are just as good as the good meditations. There are times when we can learn a lot from the distracting periods. Making friends with our mind or our anxiety is the most effective strategy in transforming them. Expectations are a common source of distress. How can we practice acceptance in situations where we hoped for a different outcome? Expectation is another kind of thought. We’ve done work in the laboratory where we’ve shown that we can create an expectation that a person will get a painful stimulus. In people that haven’t trained their mind, just the expectation that they’re about to get zapped with painful heat is enough to activate the pain circuits in the brain, even though there’s no painful stimulus. Theyve just heard a tone, which denotes that they’re going to get this painful stimulus. It turns out, in people who’ve done certain kinds of meditation practices, when we give them this expectation cue, nothing happens in the pain circuits in the brain. We can learn to let go of these expectations. Certain expectations are important for navigating everyday life. But, when we have an expectation, and it doesn’t come to fruition, we are less activated by the failure of that expectation to come to reality. Its a learnable skill. Stress is toxic because it causes your brain to tell your body to prepare for immediate action. How can we decrease the propensity of activating our fight or flight response? This is a huge and important issue. To give context, we have this chunk of real estate in the front of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. It affords us the opportunity to do something that other species can’t do very much, which is what we call mental time travel. We can anticipate the future and reflect on the past; That confers a lot of advantage to humans. But, it also gets us into trouble, because we can imagine future threats. Theyre simply imagined, but they hijack the machinery of our threat response and activate our biological systems as if they were a real threat. But, all that’s happened is we’ve had a thought or an emotion. The invitation, if you will, is: How can we harness the capacity of the prefrontal cortex and use it to our advantage? We can learn to harness this gift and control our mind in a way that would decrease the likelihood of us triggering these threat responses in contexts where theyre not necessary. We may feel calm after coming out of meditation. Still, it requires practice to maintain that calmness throughout the day. Youve shared that your next frontier of work is around microdosing. What are a few practices we can try? Weve talked about the microdosing of well-being. Research shows that one of the easiest ways to do this is if we pair these micro-practices or micro-supports around activities that we do every day. One of the things that most humans do every day is eat. If we spend even 30 seconds before we eat intentionally reflecting on all of the people that it took for us to have a meal and feeling the appreciation in our mind and heart, that’s an example of a micro-practice. You could do this a few times a day. It takes virtually no extra time. Some of us travel a fair amount. Walking through airports, for me, has transformed from something that many people consider stressful to this wonderful opportunity where you can look at people and just in your mind, you can wish people: May you be happy. That makes you happy, too. When you think about this, even for people who are living in objectively challenging circumstances, there are always going to be opportunities for this kind of microdosing. We just need to find what resonates with us and makes sense for our lives. Then, stick to it and really try to do it on a daily basis. Your team shares an invitation to improve our relationships: When we change the stories that we tell about people, our relationships with those people change. How do the stories we tell about others influence the quality of our relationships? What are a few ways we can shift them? This is part of our natural tendency to deploy narratives in how we operate, about ourselves as well as other people. I find myself having this issue all the time. There are often people who I’m scheduled to meet and I construct this image in my mind of who they are. We all do that. Most of us have had the experience, at least occasionally, of being surprised when we meet a person that we learn things about them that are inconsistent with the story that we’ve told about who they might be. It’s not that we should try to suppress the narrative, because that’s not going to work. But, having an appreciation that this is a story that we’re telling, it may not be accurate. There may be other stories that are more veridical. We use dreams as an important analogy. All of us dream every night. If we remember our dreams, we know that we have emotions in response to the dream events. But, we recognize that it’s a dream. Its all constructed in our mind. It turns out that the way that we see the world is no different than the way that the mind processes dreams; Neuroscience teaches us that. We don’t actually see the world. When we interact with the world, what we’re seeing is our construction of the world. When we’e interacting with another person, we’re interacting with our construction of the other person. It’s not to say that there’s not someone there. But, we’re responding not to the physical elements that are there, but to our conceptual construction that weve made of who they are. When we recognize that, it helps to diffuse the grip that these narratives have and allows for much more spaciousness. You often express that there is an important distinction between happiness and wellbeing. Why is that distinction essential? If we lose a loved one, we’re sad; The sadness is real and healthy. It would be weird and kind of pathological to be happy in response to loss. Its not about being happy all the time. Yet, if we have a loss and we’re sad, if we have high levels of well-being, we have this sense that everything is going to be fundamentally okay. There’s a kind of fundamental okay-ness. Thats what well-being is about. Its not about being happy. It’s about knowing that it’s okay. For example, I’ve seen the Dalai Lama with this huge range of emotion. After someone described Tibetans in a Chinese prison being tortured, he was visibly crying. But, the next moment, he noticed something funny and started laughing. Theres this emotional fluidity. If a tragedy happens and you are sad, it’s having the ability to bounce back. You don’t stay stuck in the sadness for long periods of time. You have an appropriate response. But, at some point, it is no longer appropriate and you can have other emotions. Fluidity is one of the key markers of a person who is flourishing. What is your hope for the world today? The world is experiencing the devastating consequences of the failure to cultivate well-being; Many of the difficulties we’re having in the worldincluding the devastating consequences of polarization and greedall of these problems are, at least in part, stemming from the same fundamental cause. My aspiration for the world today is that we can embrace the possibility that well-being can be learned, and that its not difficult. I feel like my role on the planet is to harness my platform as a scientist to help promote this idea and provide tools that can enable a large swath of the population to get engaged in this way. I think the very future of humanity depends on it.
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