Spies masquerading as butterfly enthusiasts

"This sketch of a butterfly contains the outline of a fortress, and marks both the position and power of the guns. The marks on the wings between the lines mean nothing, but those on the lines show the nature and size of the guns, according to the keys below."

"The marks on the wings reveal the shape of the fortress shown here and the size of the guns. The position of each gun is at the place inside the outline of the fort on the butterfly where the line marked with the spot ends. The head of the butterfly points towards the north."

---From My Adventures as a Spy, by Sir Robert Baden-Powell.

A detailed discussion of naturalists as spies is presented at the Opinionator blog at the NYT.

...over the years I’ve found that naturalists don’t actually like the connection at all. The suspicion that they may be spies just complicates the difficult job of getting access to habitats and specimens in foreign countries, which are often already leery of their odd collecting behavior. It can also get them jailed, or even murdered...

The most public of them was Sir Robert Baden Powell, better known as founder of the Boy Scouts. As a British secret agent, he thought it clever to pose as “one of the exceedingly stupid Englishmen who wandered about foreign countries sketching cathedrals, or catching butterflies.” His detailed maps of enemy fortifications were concealed within the natural patterns of butterfly wings and tree leaves...

Maxwell Knight, the British counterintelligence spymaster (and one of the models for James Bond’s boss M), actually worked on the side as a BBC natural history presenter and author. In the late 1950s, he hired a young man named David Cornwell to provide bird illustrations for one of his books, leading Cornwell into a stint as an MI5 intelligence officer in Germany — and later to a career as the novelist John Le Carré.

More at the link, via The Daily Dish.

Good news for butterfly enthusiasts

This week the butterfly forum at GardenWeb, and Reuters have carried reports of a substantial increase in the number of monarchs overwintering in the forests of northern Mexico:

"... the butterfly colonies increased by 109 percent this year to cover roughly 10 acres of forest...  But while the monarch colonies rebounded this winter, it is still the fourth-lowest year for the butterfly since researchers started census-taking in 1993. Illegal loggers have picked away roughly 3 percent of a 138,000 acre reserve since it was created in 2000 but officials say they now have that illicit harvest under control."

On the other hand, NPR reports that the drug-related violence in Mexico is having an adverse effect:

Most of this violence happens far away from the butterfly reserves, but the general sense of insecurity in Michoacan has deterred visitors... Francisco Velazquez says the number of visitors to the area this butterfly season has been the lowest ever.

The problem is that in the absence of tourist-related income, local residents may revert to their old habits of logging the local forests for income.  Without those forest refuges for overwintering, the monarchs will die.

Glasswing butterfly

Transparency renders glasswing butterflies elusive as they appear and disappear in the dense forest undergrowth. Their wings lack the covering of scales that give other butterflies their distinct coloration.

This one was apparently photographed in a butterfly house, because it is perched on a porous pad that would be placed above a sugar/water solution.  Many more pix here.

Photo found at Geneticist, via Titam et le Sirop d'Erable.

Butterfly dress from the 1890s

This blog has featured quite a few butterfly-related items, including ladies dresses (here, here, and here).  This latest addition comes from the curiously-entitled tumblr Sex, vintage, & Royals.

"Cousin-german"

I don't know where or when I encountered this word; it's been on my "words" list for years waiting to be looked up.  I was a bit surprised by what I found in the OED:

1a. The son or daughter of (one's) uncle or aunt; (one's) first cousin. (1826 R. Southey Lett. to C. Butler 232 The marriage of cousin-germans‥was allowed in the first ages of the church.)

2. A person or thing closely related or allied to another; a near relative. 1822 W. Irving Bracebridge Hall (U.K. ed.) II. 85, I had been apt to confound them [sc. rooks] with their cousins-german, the crows.)

One's brother and sister can similarly be called your "brother-german" and "sister-german," with some implications for the genetics.  Nowadays the term means the person is your brother/sister via both your parents, as opposed to a "brother on the father's side" or a "brother-uterine" (brother via your mother with a different father).

And the "german" part?  Here's the head-slap moment - it's a variant of "germain" [O.F. < Latin], which of course means "closely-related" or "relevant."

I was going to publish this without a picture, but when I ran the term through Google Images, I kept seeing moths.  Turns out there are several species of moths called the "Cousin German."  The embedded one I found here; the UK Moths site says "A rare and local species, restricted to birch woodland in the Highlands of central Scotland.  They are also illustrated in BugGuide.  Why they should have been given that common name, I have no idea.

How butterflies came to the Americas

[Vladimir Nabokov] was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University... in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right...

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated. “By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.” ...

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.

And the correlate to this - left unstated by the investigators and the NYT, but quite obvious to me - is that the reason early humans crossed Beringia from Asia to the Americas is that they were interested in the butterflies.

Further details at the New York Times.

Photo:  An endangered "Karner Blue" (Lycaeides melissa samuelis), photographed by me at Bauer Brockway Barrens, Wisconsin in May of 2010.  This butterfly was originally identified by Vladimir Nabokov.  The Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association has tentatively scheduled another field trip to this location on May 21, 2011.  Local enthusiasts can say tuned to this blog for further updates after the snow melts...

"Microcosmos"

"A collection of images taken with scanning electron microscopes (SEM) has been pieced together by London-based science author, Brandon Broll, into a book titled Microcosmos."

Top: "a wood or heathland ant, Formica fusca, holding a microchip."
Bottom: "a clutch of unidentified butterfly eggs on a raspberry plant. These eggs have already hatched."

Several dozen more images are in a gallery at The Telegraph.

Credit: Science Photo Library/Barcroft Media 

Butterflies with unusual names

Foolish Swift, Lost-Egg Skipper, Morose Sailor, Dive-bomber, Blue Heart Playboy, Drop with Glasses, Sad Green Hairstreak, Garden Inspector, Question Mark, Poodle-face Sulphur, Zigzag Sleepy-head, Mediocre Skipper, Snow-flake, Shower of Gold, Noble Night-fighter, Noseburn Wanderer, One Pip Policeman, Queen of the Night, Wandering Donkey.

Selections from a list I found at Learn About Butterflies, where you can view photographs and read about life cycles for many hundreds of species worldwide.

Pictured above is the "Snowflake" from the Amazon rainforest -

Snowflakes are invariably encountered singly, usually when seen in flight at light gaps in the forest, where trees have fallen and sunlight penetrates to ground level. These tiny butterflies have a very slow and very persistent fluttering flight, flying for long periods but apparently going nowhere ! It is in fact possible to watch one of these delightful butterflies drifting and wafting about, but without travelling more than a few metres, for several minutes before it eventually settles.

Wattle Cup Caterpillar (Calcarifera ordinata)

This amazing-looking creature is the larval form of a rather unremarkable brown Cup moth, but as a caterpillar it is highly toxic.  It lives, with all the other toxic, poisonous, and venomous creatures, in Australia.

Photo credit to Nadia302, via The Twenty Most Toxic Caterpillars.   Another great photo here.

Julia butterfly

Perched on the tendril of a Passiflora plant, the egg of the Julia heliconian butterfly may be safe from hungry ants. This species lays its eggs almost exclusively on this plant's twisted vines.

And here's the butterfly:

Upper photo credit Martin Oeggerli, National Geographic.  Lower photo credit me.

Brahmin moth

Adult and caterpillar.  Photo credit to Igor Siwanowicz (gallery at the Telegraph).

Children hunt butterflies in Cambodia

If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to kill such eccentricities as appear.

- H.G. Wells, The Wonderful Visit (1895)

Modern sensibilities are, of course, that butterflies should be collected only as digital images. Economic realities are apparently a different matter in Cambodia.

Wells quote via The Project Gutenberg Project.

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia)

A late-summer immigrant to Wisconsin from more southerly regions; does not overwinter this far north.  I photographed this one this afternoon at the Grady Tract of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.  I would love to document a life cycle on this beautiful creature; perhaps next spring I can spot one ovipositing on some plantain.

Click photo for bigger.

Metamorphosis

Credit: Photos Julie Zickefoose. Produced by Mito Habe-Evans (NPR)

Insect highways in the sky

An NPR video narrated by the incomparable Robert Krulwich, found at The Bug Girl's Blog, via Boing Boing.

Processionary caterpillars

Several British news sources posted the above photo of caterpillars crossing a road -

This incredible convoy is the ultimate commuter train - a trail of tiny caterpillars heading off into the bush. An amazing 136 caterpillars wriggled top-to-toe across a road on their migratory route in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The delicate insects were linked by a single thin silk thread which set their path out into the bush, where they will eventually turn into butterflies. Jamie Rooney, from High Wycombe, Bucks, was visiting South Africa for the World Cup when he snapped the crawling convoy.

They didn't offer any details about the biology, which took me a while to track down.  They appear to be "processionary caterpillars."  They are the larvae of moths (not butterflies), have nasty urticating hairs, and are capable of defoliating their host plants.  The silk on the trail is for grip, not for guidance, which is determined by pheromones and buy tactile stimulation by the setae of the preceding caterpillar.  More info and pix at this link.

Photo credit.

Addendum: Found quite a bit more info at this Catalonian site, including this cautionary observation -

Veterinary services have many emergency calls at the time when the caterpillars are migrating to the ground as inquisitive dogs can get too close to the intriguing procession and may pick up the hairs onto their paws, these irritate and so they lick them. Once the hairs are on the lips/tongue it will induce itching, swelling and possibly vomiting. Look out for the symptoms of : small white spots in the mouth and on the tongue, excessive drooling and chomping. In some cases partial amputation of the tongue is the only course of action.

Black Swallowtail "mating avoidance flight pattern"

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to pick a day for a hike when huge numbers of butterflies were out.  Sulphurs had emerged from alfalfa fields by the thousands, Monarchs were migrating, Pearl Crescents were on the goldenrod, but best of all the Black Swallowtails were out in force.  I usually consider myself lucky to see one or two; that afternoon I saw over a dozen in one field.

And as I watched, I saw a phenomenon I'd never encountered before.   Mating behavior is pretty easy to spot in this species, because they are large butterflies, and there's a subtle color diffference between male and female, and they are not very territorial, so when you see a "chase" you know it's a prelude to (attempted) procreation.

That afternoon I watched a female rebuff a male by flying away from the thistle where he had approached her.  He gave chase.  Instead of flying horizontally, she started to go vertical.  Totally vertical.  She was flapping herself up and up and up and up - to I would guess over a hundred feet in the air.  He was following along right behind her.  Understand these are large, powerful fliers who can move like the wind horizontally, but the vertical ascent was much slower and more laborious.  I watched these two black specks get smaller in the sky, and then...

Then she plummeted to earth.  I don't mean that she flew down.  She fell like a rock.  It was hard to see exactly, but it appeared that she just folded her wings above her head and let gravity take her down, because I didn't see even a flutter.  The poor male was left hovering a hundred feet in the air wondering where in the hell she had gone.  I would guess his pursuit is based on pheromones rather than visuals, so her sudden descent, probably right through her previous pheromone trail, might be totally undetectable.

I didn't see this just once.  I saw it four times with at least three different groups of BSTs, so I'm confident it was a standard avoidance maneuver rather than an accident or the quirk of an individual.  Later I spoke to a friend who's much more knowledgeable about butterfly behavior than I am, and he indicated that this type of flight pattern is well recognized, and has been documented among other butterflies, some of whom use it as a predator avoidance mechanism.  He suggested that I should document this somewhere - so that's why I'm writing this blog post.

Predatory and parasitic wasps

To butterfly enthusiasts, wasps are the vespa non grata of the insect world.  The first problems arise from predatory wasps - the kind that pick up caterpillars whole and carry them off.  I had a frustrating summer trying to raise Cabbage Whites on Brassica plants, even up on a balcony away from ants and slugs.  Eggs would appear, then small caterpillars, then bigger ones, then... gone.  They weren't wandering - they were being abducted, presumably by wasps carrying them off to burrows (although I never saw the malefactors, so it's possible that birds or other predators may have been responsible).

To cope with predators of that sort, the cheapest response is to wrap the host plant in tulle - the same fabric used for wedding decorations.  Shown above is tulle covering a flat of milkweed and wrapped over a pot of cabbage.

A much more difficult problem arises when dealing with parasitic wasps.  I posted a gruesome but utterly fascinating video back in January, showing the larvae of parasitic wasps bursting out of the body of a caterpillar, whose brain has been hijacked as well, so that it spins a protective cocoon over the emerged larvae.  And a little over a year ago I posted two photos of the remarkable Ichneumon wasp (click on the lower of those two pix to see her magnificent ovipositors).

I had originally thought that the tulle wrapping of the host plants would keep out the parasitic wasps (it would certainly exclude an adult Ichneumon wasp).   I was therefore somewhat dismayed to see Ed Yong's report earlier this year about the sensory skills of Trichogramma wasps.  The part about anti-aphrodisiacs was interesting, but what opened my eyes was this photo -

- showing the parasitic wasp to be smaller than the eyeball of the butterfly.  I don't think my tulle (or my more recently-acquired paint-straining fabric) has any chance against that little bugger.

The other photo at Ed's article shows that the wasps are smaller than the butterfly's eggs, and that's part of the problem, because even when I bring butterfly eggs in to an enclosure to raise them, it's possible that they were parasitized even before they hatch.  More about that later when I show the havoc wrought by parasitic flies on immature Red Admirals.

The Monarch migration has begun

Most people understand that Monarch butterflies in North America migrate south for the winter.  That process has now begun, and those interested can track the process at the Journey North website.

During the migratory process, Monarchs often gather in tree "roosts" for overnight stays.  Along the migratory route these are not nearly as spectacular as the enormous ones in Southern California or the ultimate ones at the Mexican terminus, but they are awesome spectacles nonetheless.  I've had the good fortune to see one once while hiking.  The map embedded above, from the Journey North website, shows the location of roosts reported so far.

Here is a brief amateur video of a tree roost.  The video is low resolution, but it gives a flavor of the event, and the videographer has had the good taste not to spoil the images with some irrelevant music or commentary.

Discouraging butterfly releases at weddings

The North American Butterfly Association discourages the release of butterflies at weddings.

  Butterflies raised by unregulated commercial interests may spread diseases and parasites to wild populations, with devastating results. Often, butterflies are released great distances from their points of origin, resulting in inappropriate genetic mixing of different populations when the same species is locally present. When it is not, a non-native species is being introduced in the area of release. At best, this confuses studies of butterfly distribution and migration; at worst, it may result in deleterious changes to the local ecology.

   In addition, these releases create a commercial market for live butterflies (currently about $10/apiece), with the result that, for example, the Monarch overwintering sites in Mexico and on the California coast are now targets for poachers.

More at the link.