By William Weir
on April 2, 2009 3:30 PM

The evolutionary purpose for those eyespots on butterfly wings have been the object of debate since Darwin's time. Darwin himself thought the ones on the upperside were to attract mates and the underside spots scared away predators.

A new study at Yale says he might have been right. Using evolutionary history models, Jeffrey Oliver of Yale's department of ecology and evolutionary biology and Yale biologists Antonia Monteiro and Kendra A. Robertson found that the upperside spots on bicyclus butterflies evolved more quickly than those on the underside. That's consistent with the theory that mate-attracting traits evolve faster than other traits.

As for where and how those eyespots evolved, Oliver will next use longer evolutionary models covering longer periods to for more details on their development.

Read the full study:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/03/26/rspb.2009.0182.abstract?sid=523f7648-a2d2-453e-8fb3-4576c8cf0041#aff-2

By Michael McCarthy, Environment editor
The latest stage of our hunt involves an uncomfortable visit to the Highlands

Travelling 500 miles to be bitten half to death by midges on a Highland hillside seems a high price to pay to see a butterfly the size of your thumbnail; but it has to be paid by anyone who wishes to complete The Independent's Great British Butterfly Hunt.

For the butterfly in question, the chequered skipper, now lives only in Scotland. Other typical Scottish butterflies, such as the mountain ringlet or the Scotch argus, can be found in the Lake District as well, but to set eyes on Carterocephalus palaemon you have to head north of the border. And a long way north, at that.

The effort seems worth it when you finally see this rare creature, the prettiest of all our eight species of skippers (the smallest and most primitive of our butterflies), but finding it is a chancy business.

It lives mainly in the hills of northern Argyll and around Fort William, with a relatively short flight period in late May and June, and it is perfectly possible that on the day or days you have set aside to look for it, the weather will close in with the mist and rain which are never far away in the western Highlands, and the butterfly will be nowhere to be seen.

It seems a paradoxical place for a butterfly to prosper, or as Tom Prescott of Butterfly Conservation Scotland, who went with me on the hunt this week, expressed it: "If you were a butterfly and you could live within 25 miles of any town in Britain would you choose Fort William – the wettest place in the land, where it's always raining?"

But the reason it was there, he said, was that the climate was ideal to support the caterpillar's food plant, purple moor grass.

Although it has never been very common, until 1975 the chequered skipper could be found in England, breeding in several colonies in the East Midlands – indeed, there is a thatched pub called The Chequered Skipper, complete with butterfly sign, in the pretty Northamptonshire village of Ashton, near Oundle (the village where every October the world conker championship is held).

But in the 1970s these colonies declined rapidly until the English insect went extinct – for reasons nobody really understands, although it may have been caused by the planting of conifers in what had been deciduous woodlands. The butterfly's predicament is similar to that of the Glanville fritillary of the Isle of Wight, which we profiled at the start of this week – it now has a very restricted range.

However, the Scottish colonies, which were first found 60 years ago, continue to thrive, and we went to look for the chequered skipper in one of the best known of them, Glasdrum Wood, which rises up steeply from the shore of Loch Creran, in stunning scenery 15 miles north of Oban.

We were lucky with the weather, for there was just enough warmth and sunshine to bring the butterflies out – with the temperature a couple of degrees lower we might not have seen them at all, and it was a very long way to go for nothing – although conditions were also ideal for the great affliction of anybody walking in the Highlands, the Scottish midge.

Luckily Tom had various midge defences with him, the major one being an Avon bath oil called Skin So Soft, which many local inhabitants swear by.

"You see all these hunky highlanders, fencers and dykers, spray this stuff on themselves," Tom said. "If you go into a pub you can tell if folk have been out and about, because you get this scent, like how in student pubs you can smell the cannabis. In the Highlands it's Skin So Soft."

Generous application of it became necessary as we began to climb up through the wood and into a long open glade made for power lines, known as a wayleave, which is ideal habitat for the butterfly, as the midges swarmed about our faces, biting us like billy-o, and eventually there were so many we had to put on midge hoods made of netting – we looked like a pair of bank robbers.

But we found the chequered skipper. In fact, thanks to a couple of other butterfly enthusiasts, David and Kathryn Lambert, we found a mating pair on a hazel leaf, locked in copulation.

Eventually they separated and the female fluttered off to a grass stem and immediately laid a tiny egg, while the male buzzed about with whirring wings so fast he looked momentarily like a bee.

When he came to rest, he was truly an attractive creature, displaying wings which were an alluring combination of brown and sulphur-yellow. This sighting now brings the total number of species we have found in the Great British Butterfly Hunt to 27; 31 to go.

In the eighth of our status reports we profile the hardest of all our butterflies to see, the chequered skipper, which now occurs only in the Scottish Highlands.

This tiny but handsome butterfly requires a serious effort to find, for it has gone extinct in England and is now to be found only in fairly remote parts of the Scottish Highlands. Check the weather forecast before you go; if the sun isn't shining, you may not find it.

Larval food plants In Scotland, purple moor grass. The English insects fed on another grass, wood false brome.

Where seen Now entirely restricted to north-west Scotland, in Inverness and Argyll.

Current conservation status Not enough data to produce a trend, but not thought to be declining in its Scottish breeding sites.

Thousands of 'painted lady' butterflies migrating to the Bay Area throughout this month

by Sue Dremann
Palo Alto Online Staff

Thousands of painted lady butterflies are passing through Palo Alto and surrounding communities this month.

The mass of butterflies, which can be spotted at a rate of one every 10 seconds or more, typically migrate north in waves from desert areas along the U.S.-Mexico border. They can be seen in the early spring weeks through March, according to a website by scientists at University of California, Davis.

The butterflies, known by the scientific name Vanessa cardui, are about 1 1/2 inches to 2 1/4 inches wide. They are orange with a black, lacy pattern on the wings and a series of blue "eye spots" on the lower-lobe wings.

Northward-migrating painted ladies can travel the distance from Bishop to Davis in three days, surviving on yellow-fat reserves in their bodies, according to the Davis painted lady webpage.

The butterflies do not stop to feed or mate until they have burned up their reserves, carried over from the caterpillar stage. They fly in a straight line from southeast to northwet, like "bats out of Hell," and go over obstacles rather than trying to go around them, according to Davis researchers.

In 2005, the population was so dense that their numbers impeded traffic in desert regions, researchers said.

Recent sightings in Palo Alto have included a corridor between U.S. Highway 101 and El Camino Real and concentrations were seen around Edgewood Plaza Shopping Center.

Beginning in August, the movement reverses and butterflies head south toward the desert wintering grounds, according to the U.C. Davis website.

Find this article at:
http://www.PaloAltoOnline.com/news/story.php?story_id=11747

Taiwan News, Staff Writer , Central News Agency
2009-03-21 05:26 PM

The National Expressway Bureau sets up protective nets on National Freeway No. 3 near the Linnei section in Yunlin County on March 20 to protect purple milkweed butterflies' safety during migration northward in spring.

The death rate of purple milkweed butterflies during their annual migration has dropped substantially since highway authorities adopted protective measures on one of the country's two main freeways around Tomb-Sweeping Day in 2007, an official said Friday.

The National Expressway Bureau (NEB) under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications has consistently taken a number of measures between late March and early April to protect the milkweed butterflies' safety over the past couple of years.

The time period is when the colorful insects pass over a section of National Freeway No. 3 to reach their breeding ground in northern Taiwan after wintering in the south.

In addition to using protective nets and ultra-violet light to aid the migrating butterflies, the bureau has even closed one northward lane of the freeway at some points and restricted the speed of vehicles to avoid hitting the insects.

According to the results of a field survey by professor Yang Ping-shih (楊平世) from National Taiwan University, the ratio of the butterflies killed while flying over the freeway declined from 3 percent in 2007 to 0.3 percent in 2008.

Last year, Yang led a team to observe the migration of purple milkweed butterflies at Linnei in Yunlin County from March 1 through May 31.

Yang told a news conference Friday that the peak period of butterfly migration fell between March 22 and April 7 and that the largest number appeared on April 5 when more than 1,000 insects flew over the highway per minute.

Speaking on the same occasion, NEB Director Lee Tai-ming (李泰明) said the protective measures will be expanded this year, with one northbound lane near the Linnei section of the expressway to be closed for 3 kilometers, up from 2 kilometers a year earlier, and the number of protective nets to be expanded from 460 meters to 660 meters.

[Read the original story at http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=899063&lang=eng_news

by Abby Haight, The Oregonian
Monday April 20, 2009, 8:13 PM
Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceFender's blue butterfly is one of Oregon's threatened native species that could be helped by federal grants to purchase and manage special habitats.
Oregon's threatened species and the special habitats they depend on got a $2.63 million lift Monday from the U.S. Department of Interior.

Five grants will help purchase or manage land in four counties and about 75,000 acres of state-managed highway rights-of-way.

Oregon's most imperiled species -- the northern spotted owl, coastal coho salmon, marbled murrelet, Oregon silverspot butterfly and several wildflowers -- could benefit from the grants, awarded through the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"These are projects that fit into a bigger picture," said Phil Carroll, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland. "They fill in some significant gaps of land acquisition, lands that could go on the market and be lost forever to public ownership."

The projects tie together public lands to create larger habitat.

"They'll protect lots of different species that are not yet listed and help us to keep them from being listed," Carroll said.

Oregon's funding was part of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's announcement Monday that 27 states would receive $57 million in grants for conservation planning, land purchase and management.

"They provide state agencies with much needed resources to empower landowners and communities to protect habitat and foster environmental stewardship for future generations," Salazar said in a statement.

Competition for the yearly grants runs high. The winning Oregon projects benefited a wide range of threatened species and tied together important properties, Carroll said.

The largest grant, for more than $1 million, will allow The Nature Conservancy to purchase 193 acres at Big Creek in Lane County -- habitat that is crucial for the Oregon silverspot butterfly, northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet and coastal coho salmon.

The Nature Conservancy, working with the Oregon Department of State Lands, will receive $507,000 to help buy and manage 1,690 acres at Upper and Lower Table Rocks east of Gold Hill in southern Oregon. Seasonal ponds are home to the federally protected vernal pool fairy shrimp and the dwarf woolly meadowfoam. The mesa buttes also could be home to endangered large-flowered woolly meadowfoam and Gentner's fritillaria.

A $256,820 grant will purchase conservation easements for five parcels totaling 65.5 acres in the Cardwell Hill area of Benton County. The upland and riparian habitat protects Fender's blue butterfly and its host plant, Kincaid's lupine, and could be planted with Willamette daisy, Nelson's checkermallow and golden paintbrush.

Oregon departments of Agriculture and Transportation will use a $477,963 grant to inventory populations and create management plans for 28 listed and sensitive species on 75,000 acres of highway rights-of-way.

Yamhill County will use its $391,000 to provide long-term habitat conservation on county lands to minimize the impact of land use. Targeted species include the threatened Fender's blue butterfly and the streaked horned lark, a candidate for protective listing.


-- Abby Haight; abbyhaight@news.oregonian.com