THE PAINTED LADY (A
MYSTERY REVEALED)
European
observers have long admired colourful painted lady butterflies (Vanessa Cardui)
and have wondered what happened to them at the end of each summer. Do they simply perish with the onset of cold
weather? Fresh research reveals an extraordinary story. The butterflies make an annual journey
between Europe and Africa. Researchers
combined results from sophisticated radar with thousands of sightings reported
by volunteers across Europe. The results
revealed that as the summer ends, millions of painted lady butterflies migrate
south, mostly flying at an altitude of more than 500 meters therefore hardly
ever seen by humans. The butterflies
wait for favourable winds, which they ride at an average speed of 45 kilometers
per hour on the long trip to Africa.
Their annual migration is up to 15,000 kilometers long, beginning form
as far north as the fringes of the Artic and terminating as far south as
tropical West Africa. The trip is almost
double that of the North American monarch butterfly.
It
takes six successive generations of painted ladies to complete the round-trip.
Professor
Jane Hill of the University of York, in England, explains: “The Painted Lady
just keeps going, breeding and moving.”
Annually, those steps take the whole population from northern Europe to
Africa and back again.
“This
tiny creature weighing less than a gram with a brain the size of a pin head and
no opportunity to learn from older, experienced individuals, undertakes an epic
intercontinental migration,” states Richard Fox, surveys manager at Butterfly
conversation. This insect was “once
thought to be blindly led, at the dead end in the lethal British winter,"
Fox adds. Yet this study “has shown
Painted Ladies to be sophisticated travelers.”
Nathaniel
Otoo
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