Your Own Butterfly Garden

One of the most popular ways of assisting with butterfly conservation is by planting lots of suitable food plants in the garden. The most “helpful” plants are those which flower late in the season, these can make a real difference to those butterflies which roots or hibernate, as they need to build up their fat reserves for the long winter ahead. The flowers need to be rich in nectar and also attractive to butterflies in the first place. 

Good examples include the Iceplant (Sedum Spectabile), Valerian (Valerianaceae Spp), and the Michelmas Daisy (Aster novi-belgii). It is not so important to have plants that flower during the summer as there are usually plenty around for the butterflies to choose from. However, if like most people you want to encourage butterflies whenever possible, it’s a good idea to plant a wide range of flower species to maintain a food supply at all times. Those that flower early in the year will help the winter’s survivors in early spring. 

Some people also plant things which will be suitable for larval food plants as well as for the adult butterflies. Nettles are very god for many of the “Nymphalids” so it is common for several well-meaning gardeners to leave a patch somewhere out of sight. 

Unfortunately this is only too often behind a shed or under some overhanging trees where they won’t get in the way. They then feel justified to say that they have “done their bit” in the cause of conservation; sadly though the patch is usually damp and lacks sunlight. This will nearly always be rejected by discerning female butterflies, as they will not lay eggs where they are likely to fall victim to fungal problems caused by lack of warmth ventilation and light. 

 Source: Charismatic Planet

Butterfly as Pests

A butterfly causing concern in Europe is the Geranium Bronze (Cacyreus Marshalli) which is the family lycaenidae. Originally from South Africa wehre its larval food plant was the geranium or pelargonium somehow it was introduced into Europe, where it is wreaking havoc amongst growers of its food plants. It is an unusual and attractive butterfly so its presence won’t break the hearts of many lepidopterists unless they happen to grow geraniums or pelargoniums. 

Butterflies and moths can be both pets and instrumental in the control of pests. Mostly they’re pests causing untold amounts of damage to agriculture. The most notorious is of course, the Cabbage White, which is a general name given to many similar species of Pierids, including the small white (Pieris Rapae), the large white (Pieris brassicae), and the Green veined or Mustard White (Pieris napi) of these three only the first two are pest species. 

Two moths have been instrumental in the control of rogue plant species. These’re the Crimson Speckled Footman (Utetheisa Pulchella), which was used in Australia to bring the prickly pear cactus under control. The other is the Cinnabar moth, Tyria jacobaeae, which feeds among other things, on ragwort a poisonus plant found in cattle fields. These represent a serious threat to any animal that eats them. However every year the caterpillars strip the foliage usually so severely that the plant can’t seed

Perhaps the most serious lepidopterous agricultural pest is the Gypsy Moth (Porthetria dispar), which causes untold economic damage to forested areas. It was introduced to the U.S. from Europe in 1869 when some were sent to an amateur entomologist in Medford, Massachusetts. Some of these were accidentally allowed to reach the wild, from where they started to colonize the New England states. The moth quickly established itself as there were no natural parasites to limit its spread. This combined with the fact that each female lays up to a thousand eggs made it a very successful immigrant. Another reason why it has managed to spread throughout the United States is that its larvae will eat many hundreds of different plants, and if its preferred choices are not available it will eat almost anything. 

Several different methods have been tried to wipe out this pest, but none of them has been anything more than a passing success. In the 1960s one of its natural parasites, a braconid wasp (Rogas indescretus) was released in yet another attempt. Unfortunately though, it is not limited to the Gyspy moth and has been found parasitizing a related species. This cross over from pests to the indigenous fauna is a serious problem and needs to be addressed whenever a non-active parasite or predator is introduced to a new locality. 

 

Other control methods tried include pesticides diseases, diseases, pheromone traps, and encouraging natural predators. Of these, only the traps are ecologically sound, with no impact on the species. Controlling pests without damaging the local habitat is a real problem sometimes releasing infertile male’s works and other times parasitic nematode worms will drastically reduce numbers. The answer probably lies with more research, but that suffers from the opposite problem survival in a harsh economic climate severely limits the number of research scientists.

Source: Charismatic Planet

Butterflies and moths can be both pets and instrumental in the control of pests

The Evolution of Butterflies

The story of butterfly evolution is incomplete; butterflies are inherently so delicate that their remains are very rarely preserved there’re therefore several gaps in our knowledge. Insects first made an appearance about 400 million years ago, having evolved from the same ancestral line as the spiders and centipedes. This was back in the Devonian period, in the Paleozoic era. Winged insects made an appearance soon after; somewhere around 50 million years later; during the Carboniferous period. Moths evolved before butterflies, but it is actually very difficult to say when. This is because they developed out of caddis-flies (Order Trichoptera), and there’s no single stage where they stopped being cadis-flies, and started being moths. Butterflies evolved about 40 million years later; during the Cretaceous period.

Finding a fossil butterfly is a very rare even less than 50 have been found to date, including those preserved in amber. The best fossil butterflies have been found at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in central Colorado, which is world renowned for the quality of its fossils. The beds there produce fossils that are in the order of 35 million years old. The oldest conclusive lepidopteran fossil found, however was in England at Charmouth. This was a moth called Archaeolepis mane, and is from the lower Jurassic, which makes it about 185 million years old.

The evolution of butterflies was directly linked to that of flowering plants. This is because of mutual interdependence; the butterflies need the flowers to feed on, and the plants need the butterflies to act as pollinators. This is achieved when butterflies travel between flowers to feed. As they do so, they also transfer pollen; this is sometimes so specific that only one species of plant can feed the butterfly, and conversely the butterfly may be the only species that can pollinate the plant. The consequence of this is that if one becomes extinct, so does the other. 

Butterfly Classification How They’re Named

Most butterflies have an English name and all have a Latin one, their scientific label which is derived from the “Binomial” system which was first used by Carl Linnaeus (Properly written Carl Von Linne) in 1753, in his book Species Plantarum. This was the starting point for scientific nomenclature for botanists, and the same happened for zoologists when Linnaeus published the tenth edition of Systema Naturae in 1758. What made him unique amongst scientists of his time was that he was a very systematic worker being very through and orderly. Can you imagine the mess we would be in today if Linnaeus had tried to impose a naming system on over a million different animal species without it being rigorous and methodical?

The Latin name has at least two parts and may well have extra names tacked on the end. Sometimes they translate into meaningful phrase especially those named back in Linnaeus’s time. For instance, the Small Blue is well known scientifically as Cupido minimus, which translates as “little Cupid”. This is because it is a beautiful little insect, deserving of such a name  this is typical of the period when scientists liked to put a little romance into their work in this case it was described for science in 1775 by Fuessly. 

When the species in question has various subspecies an addition is made to the name, for instance when the English form of the Old world Swallowtail, Latin name Papilio machaon, is considered, it has the word britannicus added, so it becomes Papilio machaon Britannicus. Notice also that the first letter of the Latin name is spelled with a capital. This is the generic name, whereas the first letter of the second the specific name and any others are lower case. 

You will often also see a name and possibly a date at the end of the Latin name such as “Linnaeus, 1758” this is the Descriptor the person who first described the species for science, and the date is when this information was first published. However, if the name and date are placed in parentheses, it means that the species has been moved from genus where it was first placed into another one. This may all sound a bit complicated, but it’s scientific convention it also helps to clarify the situation if someone else mistakenly uses the same Latin name for a different species. 

One of the many confusing aspects of naming any plant or animal is that as we discover more and more about which species are related to which, we have to reclassify them that is, we have to take them out of the place where we formerly thought they belonged in the “giant family tree of life,” and put them in what we hope is the right place. This means that we have to change their Latin name. To make matters even more confusing a single species may have many different common names, even in the same country. For instance the Peacock butterfly formerly had the scientific name Vanessa io. This then became Nymphalis io, and then Inachis io. But the Peacock butterfly or Europe is a very different species from that called the Peacock in the United States.