Paola Olaya-Arenas

Today I received the money from your donations, thank you all for your valuable contribution. I am thankful to have your support for my project. As soon as I order the materials I will upload invoices. Thus, you all can see how your valuable contribution supported this project, hugs. :)

Oh yes, thank you Prof. Holland :)

thank you all for your generous donations :)

Hello everyone, hope you are enjoying a beautiful day, I want to share this paper with you, interesting eh ! http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12065/epdf

Dear sponsors I am very grateful for your donations . We are going to make it ;)

Dear Backers, thank you so much for your generous donations! Every dollar raised helps get us one step closer to making this project a reality :).

Dear Backers, thank you so much for your generous donations! Every dollar raised helps get us one step closer to making this project a reality :).

First of all, THANK YOU for the very generous support!!! In response to your questions, you would be surprised at how little has been investigated on the connection between butterflies and neonicotinoids. Most insect groups outside of honey bees have been poorly studied and this is especially true for butterflies. There have been a few studies recently published on this topic that provide some information. There was a 2015 analysis that found neonicotinoids usage across the UK was negatively correlated with the abundance of 15 of 17 butterfly species (https://peerj.com/articles/1402/). However, this is a long-term correlation; the authors don't directly manipulate or measure neonicotinoids. There was also a recent study showing strong negative effects of neonicotinoids on butterflies (actually, caterpillars, their larval stage), but this was when the pesticide was directly applied to milkweed soil by backyard gardeners in an urban environments (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119133). Anyway, it's surprising to us too that so few people have studied this topic! With regard to your second question, drift from spray applications is certainly possible and if this occurs we should be able to capture it in our leaf tissue analyses. We only focused on seed treatments because they're so prevalent, especially on corn in the Midwest. If you want more information about this, there was some great work out of Penn State last year documenting this phenomenon: http://news.psu.edu/story/351027/2015/04/02/research/rapid-increase-neonicotinoid-insecticides-driven-seed-treatments :)

Monarchs are not bees but still important pollinators and they will appreciate your support :)

Thank you :)

Thanks to the sponsors of my first day of campaign. We will make it woohoo 🐞

Thank u 🐝