Drifting in a boat several miles out in the Gulf of Maine, Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, didn’t expect to see any butterflies. It was a warm July afternoon (well, for the coast of Maine) and Chris didn’t expect to see many birds either. But to his surprise, through his binoculars, […]
The seed for eButterfly was planted over 60 years ago when Jacques Larivée started Études des Populations d’Oiseaux du Québec bird checklist program. Now with over 6 million records, it’s the longest-running bird checklist program in North America. The daily checklists have provided incredibly reliable information on changes in bird populations, phenology, and geographic and […]
To celebrate the completion of our 3rd eButterfly year, we wanted to take the time to thank all of our eButterflyers. Your contributions made 2014 our best so far. eButterfly is growing by leaps and bounds. Here are a few amazing statistics that are a testament to the power of citizen scientists when we come together and join […]
Life is hard, especially if you’re a butterfly. Always feels like there is a target on your back. Turns out some of those targets (AKA wing eyespots) are useful to deflect attacks away from the butterfly’s vulnerable head and body. Having eyespots allows butterflies to live longer and lay more eggs. Surprisingly this deflection hypothesis […]
This November’s eButterflyer of the month is Daniel Jones from Texas. Dan joined eButterfly last spring and has been an extremely productive eButterfly user and our top Texas contributor ever since! He is currently ranked second for the number of species recorded in 2014 in our top 100 with 132 species from 47 checklists contributed […]
Hey butterfly lovers, graduate students Sean Ryan at the University of Notre Dame and Anne Espeset at the University of Nevada, Reno are asking for help from fellow butterflyers. These students are investigating how different environments have changed the genomes of the ubiquitous, introduced cabbage white (Pieris rapae). The findings of this project will also […]
By Peter Hall, Ottawa, Ontario My butterfly watching began in childhood when I chased a Cabbage White around a schoolyard in Ajax, Ontario, and caught it in my cap. Almost sixty years later I’m still at it. In the early days, I did some collecting, but did not keep any field notes as there was nobody to […]
This August’s eButterflyer of the month is one of our youngest contributors, 11 year old Colin Walton from Toronto, Ontario. Colin has been exposed to insects throughout his life by his mother, Antonia Guidotti, an entomologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and co-author of the new ROM Field Guide to the Butterflies of Ontario. As […]
eButterfly is very proud to be a part of the very first field guide on the butterflies of Ontario. It highlights the diversity of life by featuring 167 species of butterflies known to occur in Ontario. The ROM Field Guide to Butterflies of Ontario includes descriptive species accounts, flight season phenograms, and striking field photography […]
This July’s eButterflyer of the month is Alberta’s own Gary Anweiler. Gary has been associated with the Strickland Entomological Museum for 25 years now and wrote many of the lepidoptera species pages for the Virtual Museum site and is co-author of the annotated list of the Lepidoptera of Alberta, Canada published in 2010 and updated in 2014. He […]