March 11, 2025: The COVID kids, how to save butterflies, and microplastics in our food crops. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | West Coast lady butterflies range across the western U.S., but their numbers have dropped by 80 percent in two decades. Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • From 2000 to 2020, butterfly populations in the continental U.S. declined by 22 percent, according to a new report. But it's not too late to help many species. | 5 min read | | | • Microplastics can reduce photosynthesis by as much as 7 to 12 percent, on average, across a wide range of plant species—including crucial food crops. This could have major ramifications for global food supply. | 3 min read | | | • Are foodborne illnesses and deaths in the U.S. getting worse? New data on food recalls explain the latest trends. | 6 min read | | | Vera Livchak/Getty Images | | | The COVID-Resilient Generation | Today is the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID a pandemic. Last week I wrote about the lessons, both positive and negative, from how we handled SARS-CoV-2. Perhaps no aspect of the U.S. pandemic response was as fiercely debated as school closures, my colleague Tanya Lewis wrote last week. For at least a full academic year, kids attended virtual school from home, with parents ( mostly moms) taking on the brunt of supervising education. Academic performance soundly dipped during the pandemic, as did kids' mental health.
Learning: Student academic performance had been declining before 2020, but math and reading scores dropped even further during the pandemic. A survey of 2,400 public schools by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences shows that at the start of the 2022-2023 school year, 49 percent of students were behind their grade level (that number was 36 percent before the pandemic). In high-poverty communities, 61 percent of public school students were behind their grade level.
| | | Amanda Montañez; Source: School Pulse Panel, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences (data) | | | More kids continue to miss school five years after the start of the pandemic than before it. The Department of Education reported average national rates of chronic absenteeism (missing 10 percent or more school days in a year) at 31 percent in the 2021–2022 school year and 28 percent in the following year, compared with 17 percent in the 2018–2019 school year.
Mental health: Important social development happens in school. And kids who were younger during the pandemic (who are now middle schoolers) lost about two years of social behavioral learning. In this group, teachers have observed behaviors more commonly seen in younger grades, like more sensory-seeking behavior (touching others more frequently), a lack of self-awareness (not noticing they're wearing a shirt inside out) or difficulty interpreting social situations.
A small study that scanned the brains of middle schoolers and teens during the peak pandemic years showed cortical thinning—a sign of rapid brain maturation. The effect was significantly stronger for girls than boys. Such brain changes are associated with the onset of disorders like anxiety and depression. "We knew that anxiety and depression really skyrocketed during the pandemic, and there are many studies showing that it was much more severe for females than males," says Neva Corrigan, a research scientist at the University of Washington. "Now, notably, these trends seem to have continued even after the lockdowns ended."
| | | Amanda Montañez; Source: Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013–2023. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024 (data) | | | What can be done: To improve academic performance, educators are trying multiple approaches, like reducing class sizes and extending the academic year. In July 2023 the Richmond Public Schools district in Virginia ran a pilot program that added 20 days to the school calendars of two elementary schools. The results showed improved literacy rates and school attendance.
Rather than individualized interventions for kids, supporting whole families leads to greater improvements in both learning and mental health, studies show. "One of the guiding principles that we follow across a lot of different parenting programs—that's based on decades of research—is balance in parenting," says child psychiatrist Mari Kurahashi at the Stanford Parenting Center. "Balance being supportive, warm, validating, affectionate and, at the very same time, being firm, having lots of limits, setting consistency."
What the experts say: "There is a harm story to be told from this, and there's a resilience story to be told from this. And both can be true at the same time," says Candice Odgers, a quantitative and developmental psychologist specializing in adolescent mental health at the University of California, Irvine. "We have to be careful that we look with a little more nuance and skepticism about what the long-run impacts of this really will be and not to write off an entire generation of young people as lost—because they are not." | | | • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service (NWS), is on the verge of losing nearly 20 percent of its work force on order from the Trump Administration. Oil industry interests bankrolled Trump's campaign and "these interests want NWS and NOAA to stop studying and cataloguing our climate crisis, because anything we do to curb our thirst for energy affects their profit margin," writes Megha Satyanarayana, chief opinion editor at Scientific American. The NWS manages radar systems, satellites, weather gauges and modeling programs that track storms to relay to city officials, police, fire, EMS and emergency managers. Gutting the NWS will seriously impair disaster response and place prohibitive costs on state and private weather services, she says. "This is antiscience, anti-information and anti–public interest. Congress and our judicial system must act more quickly to stop this." | 5 min read | | | You can help butterfly populations in your own backyard, even if you only have a small planter on a fire escape. Native plants feed many threatened pollinator species. Check out this list of beneficial plant species that thrive in your region and can support insects like butterflies. Sadly, you can't trust that every plant you find in your local nursery naturally occurs in your area, as many shops stock hearty and attractive plants that can survive in many different growing zones, but aren't ideal to supporting specialized, local bugs. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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