Showing posts with label butterflies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label butterflies. Show all posts

Monday, March 11, 2019

Life isn't all Rainbows and Butterflies...

Guest post by Carolyn Thickett, MSc. Candidate at the University of Toronto-Scarborough

Life isn't all Rainbows and Butterflies...

… especially in an age of extreme habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasions by alien species and climate change. All of these pressures are contributing to the dramatic decline of insects currently being observed all around the world.

In Canada, the general public is responding by trying to contribute their time and knowledge in any way that they can. Citizen Science programs encourage people with little or no previous experience to participate by working with staff from one of the conservation areas in the Greater Toronto Area. These programs are aimed at engaging the general public in conservation efforts for the purpose of education, but with the added benefit of reducing the cost of expensive conservation work.

Many more events are happening out of the public eye, not advertised, even held in secret. I attended one such event this past June, held in an undisclosed location, in Eastern Ontario. This was an invitation-only event, attended by a consortium of people concerned about the status of the Mottled Duskywing Butterfly in Ontario, spearheaded by butterfly enthusiast Jessica Linton.

Mottled Duskywing Butterfly. Photo: Carolyn Thickett


Dr. Gard Otis, a bee and butterfly researcher from the University of Guelph, is unveiling new
information about these specialist butterflies and their unique habitat requirements. The Mottled Duskywing depends on New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus), a plant that is common to alvars as well as sandy soils supporting oak savannas, a critically endangered habitat in Canada. Land management issues related to the preservation and restoration of grassland habitats, such as oak savannas, must then be included in the Mottled Duskywing recovery strategy.

One of those issues is fire suppression, originally put into practice due to the inherent risk to
property and human lives. The suppression of fire over time promotes plant succession, which is the process by which grasslands turn into shrublands, then into thickets and eventually into forests. Succession is detrimental to New Jersey Tea. It is a grassland plant that requires full sun and is unable to compete with the increasing canopy density of a forest. But what if fire wasn’t suppressed? Wouldn’t New Jersey Tea burn too?



As it turns out, New Jersey Tea is not only tolerant of fire, but it produces vigorous growth shortly after a fire disturbance (Throop & Fay, 1999). So, there is a threatened population of butterflies… living in a rare habitat… and scientists are setting it on fire?? Yup. It’s called prescribed burning.

But how do the butterflies survive such a disturbance? Sites are burned in sections, creating a patchwork of habitat with some portions left for conditions required by the butterflies. Some research by Swengel and Swengel (2007) suggests that some permanent unburned areas within the landscape may be important for specialist Lepidopterans, such as the Mottled Duskywing and the Karner Blue Butterfly (Lycaeides melissa samuelis), which is extirpated in Canada. Additionally, fire can provide many benefits which can even outweigh the risks. Recent work by Henderson et al. (2018) shows the short-term positive effect on another grassland butterfly to prescribed fire regimes. The diagrams below illustrate the results of their study and show the positive benefit derived from regular, and even frequent, burns.



Dr. Otis and myself walked transects through specific locations within the landscape, recording the location of each Mottled Duskywing that we encountered, the quantity of New Jersey Tea plants and keeping tally of the totals. Dr. Otis’ study will examine how Mottled Duskywings respond to the prescribed burns by utilizing different portions within the landscape. The next prescribed burn will occur early next spring by property staff, then the butterfly populations will again be assessed and compared with the baseline data.

In addition, staff at the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory are currently working on determining the caterpillar rearing requirements of a related species, the Wild Indigo Duskywing. At this point they have had success getting females to lay eggs in captivity and rearing the larvae. The knowledge gained with the Wild Indigo Duskywings will be applied to the Mottled Duskywings, working towards reintroduction to one or more sites where they used to occur within the province, perhaps as early as 2020.

The Mottled Duskywing butterfly population we surveyed is the largest in Canada. At the end of the count, we received word that 4 teams of observers recorded 210 butterflies. This was great news for the researchers as the population appears to be stable, although the true population can only be determined through a detailed mark-recapture study which is tentatively being planned for summer 2019.

Mottled Duskywing conservation is gaining momentum… work has already started on habitat recovery and caterpillar rearing protocols. The information gathered and recovery actions taken could have implications for many other native prairie and grassland species. The same can be said for every other count, assessment, or restoration event. Whether you are a researcher or a concerned citizen, get involved. Know that your efforts could have massive implications for biodiversity, you could even SAVE a species from extinction!

To get involved in conservation, visit citizen science.

For more information on Mottled Duskywing butterflies, read the recovery strategy.

References

Fickenscher, J.L., Litvaitis, J.A., Lee, T.D. & Johnson, P.C. Insect responses to invasive shrubs:
Implications to managing thicket habitats in the northeastern United States. Forest Ecology
and Management 322 (complete), 127-135 (2014).

Henderson, Richard A., Meunier, Jed, & Holoubek, Nathan S. Disentangling effects of fire,
habitat, and climate on an endangered prairie-specialist butterfly. Biological Conservation 218
(complete), 41-48 (2018).

Swengel, A. B. & Swengel, S. R. Benefit of permanent non-fire refugia for Lepidoptera
conservation in fire-managed sites. Journal of Insect Conservation 11, 263–279 (2007).

Throop, Heather L. & Fay, Philip A. Effects of fire, browsers and gallers on New Jersey tea
(Ceanothus herbaceous) growth and reproduction. The American Midland Naturalist 141 (1),
51 (1999).

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Unexpected effects of global warming in novel environments: butterflies emerge later in warming urban areas.

ResearchBlogging.orgThere is now ample evidence that warming temperatures cause advances in the timing of organismal activity (i.e., phenology). Studies have shown that rising temperatures are responsible for earlier plant leafing and flowering (Miller-Rushing & Primack 2008, Wolkovich et al. 2012), pest insect emergence and abundance (Willis et al. 2008), and even local species loss and reduced diversity (Willis et al. 2008). One emerging expectation from global warming studies is that insects should emerge earlier since winters are milder and spring temperatures are warmer. This expectation should hold so long as high temperatures or other environmental stressors don’t adversely affect the insects. And the concern about shifts in emergence and insect activity is the potential for mismatches between plant flowering and the availability of pollinators (Willmer 2012) –if insects emerge too soon, they may miss the flowers.

Photo by Marc Cadotte


In a forthcoming paper in Ecology by Sarah Diamond and colleagues study 20 common butterfly species across more than 80 sites in Ohio. These sites were located in a range of places across a rural to urban gradient. Instead of finding earlier emergence in warmer places, which were typically urban areas, they found that a number of species were delayed in warmer urban areas. Even though the butterflies might emerge earlier in warmer rural habitats, they were adversely affected in urbanized areas. 

These results highlight the need to consider multiple sources of stress from different types of environmental change. Observations from a few locales or from controlled experiments may not lead to conclusions about interactive influences or warming and urbanization, and that's why this study is so important. It observes a counter-intuitive result because of the influence of multiple stressors. 

A next step should be to determine if pollinator-plant interactions are being disrupted in these urban areas. The reason why we should care so much about pollinator emergence is that they provide a key ecological service by pollinator wild, garden, and agricultural plants, as well has being an important food source to other species. A mismatch in timing and disrupt these important interactions.

References

Diamond S.E., Cayton H., Wepprich T., Jenkins C.N., Dunn R.R., Haddad N.M. & Ries L. (2014). Unexpected phenological responses of butterflies to the interaction of urbanization and geographic temperature. Ecology.

Miller-Rushing A.J. & Primack R.B. (2008). Global warming and flowering times in Thoreau's Concord: a community perspective Ecology, 89, 332-341.

Roos J., Hopkins R., Kvarnheden A. & Dixelius C. (2011). The impact of global warming on plant diseases and insect vectors in Sweden. Eur J Plant Pathol, 129, 9-19.

Willis C.G., Ruhfel B., Primack R.B., Miller-Rushing A.J. & Davis C.C. (2008). Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods are driven by climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 17029-17033.

Willmer P. (2012). Ecology: pollinator-plant synchrony tested by climate change. Curr. Biol., 22, R131-R132.

Wolkovich E.M., Cook B.I., Allen J.M., Crimmins T.M., Betancourt J.L., Travers S.E., Pau S., Regetz J., Davies T.J., Kraft N.J.B., Ault T.R., Bolmgren K., Mazer S.J., McCabe G.J., McGill B.J., Parmesan C., Salamin N., Schwartz M.D. & Cleland E.E. (2012). Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change. Nature, 485, 494-497.


Diamond, S., Cayton, H., Wepprich, T., Jenkins, C., Dunn, R., Haddad, N., & Ries, L. (2014). Unexpected phenological responses of butterflies to the interaction of urbanization and geographic temperature Ecology DOI: 10.1890/13-1848.1