Do you want to learn about the latest features released on eButterfly such as computer image recognition, a discussion forum, eBLabs, and more? Or maybe you’d like to learn how to use eButterfly for its full potential? If so, don’t miss our upcoming webinar on Thursday, July 21st, at 4 PM (EST) with Rodrigo Solis Sosa, our Human Network and Data Coordinator. Pre-register here: https://bit.ly/3IxTUSj
Peter Hall, scientific advisor for eButterfly, recently traveled to Panama. Read about his adventure and the amazing butterfly observations he shared with eButterfly. “We ended up staying in three very different facilities belonging to the Canopy Family – the Canopy Camp in the Darien jungle to the east, the Canopy Lodge in the cloud forests to the west and the Canopy Tower in the lowland Canal Zone in the centre. Our main targets were the immense diversity of butterflies and birds found in this small country. All the facilities also had expert local guides who knew where to go and how to identify this diversity. By the end of our visit, our butterfly checklist stood at 225 species and bird list at 232. And that’s not even to mention the twenty-plus mammal species and countless other smaller life forms.”
Forecasting species responses to climate change is integral to the development of adaptive and practical conservation decisions. Butterflies are climate-constrained in at least two ways, as ectotherms, the climate has a defining role in dictating where butterflies can live. Additionally, a warming climate may have huge impacts on their host plant availability. These constraints could mean certain butterfly species may have to move north, or up in elevation, to stay within their preferred temperature range. Predicting how butterflies might respond to such temperature and host plant shifts could inform decisions involving conservation prioritization, species management, and natural resource management.
In 2010 when the largest butterfly in North America fluttered among Ardys Fisher’s flowers at the end of July, she knew it was something neat. Now, our study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution this week shows an unusually rapid northward range shift by the Eastern Giant Swallowtail over the last two decades.
For every butterflier, I would be willing to bet that over the years, when out on field trips, you have had some ‘special’ butterflies in mind that you hope to come across – in other words, ‘Holy Grails’ or, simply, grails.
