We’re excited to announce some great improvements and new tools for eButterfly that we just released, with even more on the way. Our team has worked hard all winter to improve how the communications center operates, adding additional languages, upgrading the checklist submission process, improving the user experience for viewing checklists, updates that increase the performance of eButterfly, and many minor bug fixes.
In 2010 when the largest butterfly in North America fluttered among Ardys Fisher’s flowers at the end of July, she knew it was something neat. Now, our study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution this week shows an unusually rapid northward range shift by the Eastern Giant Swallowtail over the last two decades.
Western butterfly populations are declining at an estimated rate of 1.6% per year, according to a new report published this week in Science. The report looks at more than 450 butterfly species, including the western monarch, whose latest population count revealed a 99.9% decline since the 1980s.
From the first observation of 2020, a Gulf Fritillary nectaring on the Gulf coast of Florida submitted by Gary Leavens, to a Long-tailed Skipper nectaring at the end of December shared by mbspang, butterfly watchers added over 38,500 butterfly records to the ever growing eButterfly database of checklists. The reports fluttered in all summer long. We had more than 8,300 checklists with over 22,000 photographs comprising 523 species of butterflies reported during the year.
From July 24 to August 2, 2020, volunteers in Canada, Mexico and the United States helped monarch experts gain more information to enable better understanding of the distribution of the migratory monarch butterfly, an emblematic North American species. This year 520 volunteers across 68 states and provinces participated in the Blitz. They recorded 9,649 monarchs at various stages of their life cycle, from eggs to full-fledged butterflies. And together, they monitored 40,321 milkweed plants, the sole food source for monarch caterpillars.
The long-term effects of climate change suggests that the butterfly effect is at work on butterflies in the alpine regions of North America, according to a new study by University of Alberta scientists—and the predictions don’t bode well. The researchers used climate change models to understand the effects of changing ecosystems on alpine butterflies in North America. The results show that alpine butterflies who have specialized diets, meaning that they feed on one or a few plants, are more vulnerable to climate change because of fluctuations in their food. On the other hand, butterflies that have diverse diets are less likely to be affected.
‘Holy Grail’ butterflies are those rare, remote, hard-to-find, attractive species that linger in the imagination. For Peter Hall, the holiest of grails for many years, beginning in his childhood, was the Jamaican Giant Swallowtail (Papilio homerus). It was more like a myth than an actual species – seen by few and living in only two isolated and diminishing locations in the remoter rainforest of the Caribbean island, Jamaica.
United by our passion for butterflies, eButterfly is a community where we share observations, photographs, and expertise. We also share a deep conviction that our collective experiences and observations will ultimately make the world a better place for butterflies, people, and the environment we inhabit together.
Are you looking to turn your love of butterfly watching into real science and conservation? Try eButterfly! Join eButterfly’s Rodrigo Solis for an hour-long recorded webinar and learn the basics and more about how to use eButterfly. Watch as he goes through the three easy steps to adding a butterfly checklist, how to use the new identification tool, explore data, and more. All from the comfort of your own screen and at your own pace. What are you waiting for? Let Rodrigo help get you started!
For every butterflier, I would be willing to bet that over the years, when out on field trips, you have had some ‘special’ butterflies in mind that you hope to come across – in other words, ‘Holy Grails’ or, simply, grails.
