Glass in Flight, the amazing new glass and steel sculpture exhibit of sparkling butterflies, dragonflies, bamboo, bees and beetles by Alex Heveri, will soon be flying on its way to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum!
The International Monarch Monitoring Blitz invites community scientists from across North America to come together with the shared goal of helping to protect and conserve the beloved and emblematic monarch butterfly. Data collected by volunteers each year support trinational efforts to better understand the monarch butterfly’s breeding productivity, range, and timing in North America.
Our vision is to make eButterfly the largest butterflying community in the world!
To achieve that goal, we just launched our discussion forum. In this place, you will interact with all other eButterfly users and talk about anything butterfly related, from identifications, science, stories, feature requests and much more!
Join Rodrigo Solis Sosa, our Human Network and Data Coordinator, as he explains how to use eButterfly and our latest updates on eButterfly V6.0 in this recorded webinar from July 25th. We hope you will join the eButterfly community to help us track butterflies for science and conservation.
After almost a year in the making, thousandths of development hours, and an immense amount of feedback from our users. July 20th at midnight (EST), the wait will be over, eButterfly V6.0 is here!
We made a considerable effort to make this new version as similar as possible to the previous but simultaneously with several key new features and massive performance improvements.
Please join us tomorrow, Thursday, July 21st at 4 PM (EST) for a webinar where we will introduce all those new features.
Do you want to learn about the latest features released on eButterfly such as computer image recognition, a discussion forum, eBLabs, and more? Or maybe you’d like to learn how to use eButterfly for its full potential? If so, don’t miss our upcoming webinar on Thursday, July 21st, at 4 PM (EST) with Rodrigo Solis Sosa, our Human Network and Data Coordinator. Pre-register here: https://bit.ly/3IxTUSj
The presence of monarch butterflies in Mexico’s forests this past winter was 35% greater than the previous year, according to the most recent survey led by WWF Mexico. This increase marks a sign of recovery—albeit a fragile one—and gives some reason for hope against a backdrop of several decades of decline for the iconic species. According to the survey, Forest Area Occupied by the Colonies of Monarch Butterflies in Mexico During the 2021-2022 Overwintering Season, the species’ presence in and around Mexico’s famed Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve grew from 5.19 acres in December 2020 to 7.02 acres in December 2021.
It was a cloudless midsummer day in 2019 when Siaja Parceaud-May noticed a Booth’s sulphur butterfly that had some “noticeable differences.” She was about an hour north of her home community of Kuujjuaq in Quebec’s Nunavik region with a team of entomologists and researchers from the Montreal Insectarium, learning how to identify and collect butterflies. Along a sandy, cleared ridge toward Ungava Bay, she spotted the peculiar critter that would be sent to Montreal for further analysis. Her hunch turned out to be right. More than a year later, insectarium director Maxim Larrivée wrote to her — confirming that she had discovered a new subspecies of Colias tyche. To her surprise, it would be named in her honour: Colias tyche siaja.
We are pleased to share a new iBook, “Wings that Make Waves”. Biological illustrator Kim Moss teamed up with Ecologist Dr. Diane Debinski and Ph.D. student Simone Durney to create this interactive book, which is focused on using butterflies as bioindicators. The authors wanted to make the story of their research more accessible to the general public, park visitors, and K-12 teachers. Read more about this project and where to download a free copy of this amazing book.
Peter Hall, scientific advisor for eButterfly, recently traveled to Panama. Read about his adventure and the amazing butterfly observations he shared with eButterfly. “We ended up staying in three very different facilities belonging to the Canopy Family – the Canopy Camp in the Darien jungle to the east, the Canopy Lodge in the cloud forests to the west and the Canopy Tower in the lowland Canal Zone in the centre. Our main targets were the immense diversity of butterflies and birds found in this small country. All the facilities also had expert local guides who knew where to go and how to identify this diversity. By the end of our visit, our butterfly checklist stood at 225 species and bird list at 232. And that’s not even to mention the twenty-plus mammal species and countless other smaller life forms.”
