Do you think the Monarch butterfly's population increase in the past two years signals a permanent reversal of their decline?

Way to early to tell, the population is still below 20% of what can be considered normal.

I would not ascribe the small rebound as related to climate change, but more likely to a reduction in neonicotinoid use.

Permanent? No chance!

I just heard a lecture at a local wildflower preserve from one of the scientists studying monarch butterflies. His guess was that migration is seriously threatened, but the species will continue because it has succeeded in finding warm weather locations that it can occupy for the full year. Maybe global warming will be to their advantage, at least in the short term.

I was thinking that the increase might have been related to a couple of years of more Monarch-favorable weather, @zenvelo, more so than “climate change”. However, @LostInParadise suggest the larger “climate change” could be in the butterfly’s favor.

I’d not heard that, @LostInParadise. Can you source, or do you know where these “arm weather locations that it can occupy for the full year” are located?

It was a relatively small reversal, @stanleybmanly. It could be permanent.

That was a bit of wishful thinking on my part. I was thinking that monarchs would not need to migrate from areas where winter weather became warm enough for them live year round.

There is a classical set of mathematics equations called The Lotka–Volterra equations, or Predator-Prey, or Wolves and Rabbits equations that describes the population of two species that interact in nature. Example as the population of rabbits increases, the number of wolves increases as well until the wolves start eating all the rabbits and the wolves begin to starve and die off. Then the rabbit population increases again.
Is it possible a predator to Monarchs, a type of bird for example was starved out during the lean years allowing the Monarchs to recover?.

True story. A few years ago I volunteered to hatch Admiral butterflies in a fish tank on my screened-in porch. It was so much fun. The neighbors grand kids would come over to watch the caterpillars grow and form cocoons. Finally the butterflies started to come out. We had about a dozen It was spectacular. The kids had them on their faces and fingers. We took lots of pictures.
I had one of the kids open the porch door and take a butterfly outside to let it go. With a little prodding the butterfly walked onto his finger and they stepped outside. He tentatively waved his hand slowly and eventually the butterfly took off and fluttered into the air just about at eye level. Then, Baam! a bird swooped down and grabbed it. Poof! We were all horrified. The kid was screaming, then crying. His brother started crying in sympathy. His grandmother was upset. Ugh!
I hope he doesn’t turn out to be some mass murderer as a result of that trauma.

@LuckyGuy Haha..well, such is the nature of nature. I always think about those hatching loggerhead turtle babies that barely scrabble out of the sand to get swooped up by sea birds inches from the safety of the ocean.

Yes, nature works in cyclical of symbiosis as @LuckyGuy speaks of.
Yesterday I observed how our torrential rainfall this last 3 or so days flooded out hundreds of earthworms from the ground being so saturated. They are everywhere, drowned and floating in puddles and scattered about. Last night at dusk I was watching 5–6 Robins gorging on the bountiful harvest along the gravel driveway here. Easy pickins’.

Nothing is permanent.

Get used to the idea that NOTHING is permanent. The earth is warming, well, yeah, but it will eventually cool again, then warm again, then cool. By that time many species will have teetered on the brink, some will have survived, others won’t. It will happen no matter what you do.

@Guitarded Yep, even the sun will die, but enough of the doomsday stuff for now. lol

IMHO we have to stop looking for emotional reasons for global warming/climate change issues in everything and everything like a 4 year swing in Monarch populations. Trends are trends and trends are our friend and time to embrace this fact.