For some of us in the north, a Cabbage White fluttering in the garden on a warm November day may be the last butterfly we see for the year. Recently, an international team of researchers has used the power of genomics to reveal the mechanisms of an ancient and ongoing arms-race between butterflies and plants, […]
This week eButterfly co-director Katy Prudic is at the White House in Washington, D.C. where she was invited to a small White House conference called Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, By the People, For the People. The meeting will focus on the new federal citizen science toolkit and other crowdsourcing sites like eButterfly. Read […]
An avid citizen scientist, Mark Olivier, after having recorded and documented over 1,000 bird sightings has found another niche — butterflies. The era of citizen science has flourished with the advent of the Internet, partly because it provides a platform for bird watchers and outdoor enthusiast to share their sightings, said Olivier. Sault Naturalists have engaged […]
On June 19, 2015, five intrepid lepidopterists – Jacques Larivée, Chris Schmidt, Rick Cavasin, Peter Hall and Max Larrivée – set out to explore the east side of James Bay in Quebec. headed north from Ottawa, we travelled up the James Bay Highway, the northernmost paved road in eastern North America culminating at nearly 54 […]
I have the great fortune of living in a mature hardwood forests on a two acre lot in Rigaud, Québec, Canada. This has allowed me to witness butterfly and moth behaviour and phenological events in ways I had never experienced in the past. This morning, similarly to last July, the first thing I saw when I […]
Drifting in a boat several miles out in the Gulf of Maine, Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, didn’t expect to see any butterflies. It was a warm July afternoon (well, for the coast of Maine) and Chris didn’t expect to see many birds either. But to his surprise, through his binoculars, […]
The seed for eButterfly was planted over 60 years ago when Jacques Larivée started Études des Populations d’Oiseaux du Québec bird checklist program. Now with over 6 million records, it’s the longest-running bird checklist program in North America. The daily checklists have provided incredibly reliable information on changes in bird populations, phenology, and geographic and […]
To celebrate the completion of our 3rd eButterfly year, we wanted to take the time to thank all of our eButterflyers. Your contributions made 2014 our best so far. eButterfly is growing by leaps and bounds. Here are a few amazing statistics that are a testament to the power of citizen scientists when we come together and join […]
Life is hard, especially if you’re a butterfly. Always feels like there is a target on your back. Turns out some of those targets (AKA wing eyespots) are useful to deflect attacks away from the butterfly’s vulnerable head and body. Having eyespots allows butterflies to live longer and lay more eggs. Surprisingly this deflection hypothesis […]
This November’s eButterflyer of the month is Daniel Jones from Texas. Dan joined eButterfly last spring and has been an extremely productive eButterfly user and our top Texas contributor ever since! He is currently ranked second for the number of species recorded in 2014 in our top 100 with 132 species from 47 checklists contributed […]