#Glanville fritillary

[petec9099]

Highlights of 2023 (6): Butterflies of Hutchinsons Bank

[insidecroydon]

Butterfly experts in flap over 'extinct' species in New Addington

The sighting of a butterfly thought to have been extinct for nearly 100 years at Hutchinson’s Bank at the weekend has put wildlife enthusiasts into a bit of a flap. Spotted: Frank Gardner’s ‘trophy’ photo of the black-veined white butterfly at Hutchinsons Bank from Saturday The sighting of the black-veined white butterfly was made by Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent and an amateur…

[calochortus]

Glanville fritillary - Melitaea cinxia by Pieter-Jan Alles Via Flickr: Ardèche, France

[sebastienblommephotography]

Belle mélitée 📷 @sebastien_blomme 🇫🇷 Ce joli papillon est une mélitée du plantin. J'avoue que je ne le photographie pas très souvent malgré sa beauté. Et c'est un tort car c'est non seulement un papillon magnifique, mais en plus il se pose très tôt avant le coucher du soleil ce qui facilite le travail du photographe 😊 🇬🇧 This pretty butterfly is a Glanville Fritillary. I admit that I don't photograph it very often despite its beauty. And it's a mistake because not only is it a magnificent butterfly, but it also lands very early before sunset, which makes the photographer's job easier 😊 https://ift.tt/A3BbOoT

[viscommblogs]

May 15th - Experiment research

First I looked for a list of the red list species of butterflies

Half of British butterfly species on new Red List | Butterfly Conservation (butterfly-conservation.org)

Revised Red List of British Butterflies | Zenodo

A revised Red List of British butterflies

Richard Fox1 & Emily B. Dennis1

1 Butterfly Conservation, Manor Yard, East Lulworth, Dorset BH20 5QP, UK.

Using this list I am going to research these butterflies to find images.

Black Hairstreak

Glanville Fratillery

Grayling

Heath Fritillary

High Brown Fritillary

Large heath

Wall

Wood White

Using these images I am going to create experimentations in different ways considering shape and lines to see how I could create a themed typeface connecting to the red list of butterflies.

[cool-critters]

Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia)

The Glanville fritillary is a butterfly of the family Nymphalidae. These butterflies live in almost all of Europe, especially Finland, and in parts of northwest Africa. It has been discovered that this butterfly only mates one time in June or July and lays its eggs. It does not provide any protection to these eggs or care for the offspring. As adults, the Glanville fritillaries are short-lived; they spend most of their lives as caterpillars. As caterpillars, Glanville fritillaries enter a stage of diapause, which is a period of suspended development, during the winter time. The spiked speedwell and ribwort plantain are the Glanville fritillary's preferred plants to lay eggs and to eat as larvae. Female butterflies will show a preference for one plant species over the other when deciding where to lay their eggs, but the caterpillars have no preference once they hatch. After entering the adult phase the fritillaries feed on nectar of the spiked speedwell and ribwort plantain, among others. This species of butterfly is at risk of population decline because it is not a migratory species. 

photo credits: Harald Süpfle, Sven Damerow

[ifelten]

Okkergul pletvinge (Melitaea cinxia)

Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia)

[fulviomeloni]

Glanville fritillary by hans24 http://500px.com/photo/257689859 #macro

[mike13mt]

Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) by ernstpluess

[anirobot]

Metapopulation - Wikipedia

Ilkka Hanski - Wikipedia

Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) - Wikipedia

[petec9099]

A trip to Hutchinsons Bank

[iihbki3]

Picture of the day: Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) covered with water drops, in Wittenberge-Rühstädter Elbniederung nature reserve, Germany https://t.co/nPDQc0IlM5

[dxmedstudent]

Butterflies released in Finland contained parasitic wasps – with more wasps inside

[faveprettythings]

Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia)

Photo by Francesco Cassulo on flickr

[sarkos]

When caterpillars of a beautiful butterfly were introduced on to the tiny island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, scientists hoped to study how the emerging butterflies would disperse across the landscape. But researchers did not realise that their introduction of the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) led to the emergence of three other species on to the Baltic Sea island, which sprang out of the butterfly like Russian dolls. Some of the caterpillars contained a parasitic wasp, Hyposoter horticola, which bursts from the caterpillar before it can pupate and become a butterfly. Living inside some of these small wasps was another even tinier, rarer parasite, a “hyperparasitoid” wasp known as Mesochorus cf. stigmaticus. It kills the parasitic wasp around the same time as the wasp kills the caterpillar, and emerges 10 days later from the caterpillar’s carcass. Also along for the ride was a bacterium that is carried by the female H. horticola wasps and transmitted to her offspring. By some unknown mechanism, Wolbachia pipientis increases the susceptibility of the parasitic wasp to being taken over by the tiny parasitic wasp M. stigmaticus, which can only live on the H. horticola wasp. Perhaps most surprisingly, given that small island populations are notoriously vulnerable to extinction, all four species are still surviving on the 27 sq km island 30 years after the original introduction.

Butterflies released in Finland contained parasitic wasps – with more wasps inside | Butterflies | The Guardian

[sciencespies]

How a scientist's blunder let loose stomach-bursting parasites on a remote island

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-a-scientists-blunder-let-loose-stomach-bursting-parasites-on-a-remote-island/

How a scientist's blunder let loose stomach-bursting parasites on a remote island

An ecologist’s blunder led to the release of a ‘Russian doll’ set of stomach-bursting parasites onto a remote Finnish island, a new study has revealed.

Thirty years ago, when ecologist Ilkka Hanski introduced Glanville fritillary butterflies (Melitaea cinxia) onto the island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, he planned to watch how a population of one species that had been placed inside a harsh habitat could survive. 

But he had no idea that a trio of nested parasites would come along for the ride – with two parasites living inside another parasite, which was itself nested inside some of the butterflies.

Glanville fritillary butterfly, from which the stomach-bursting parasites emerged. (Arterra/Getty Images)

Related: Zombie animals: 5 real-life cases of body-snatching 

The latter parasites, the larvae of the parasitic wasps Hyposoter horticola, eat the Glanville caterpillars they are injected into from the inside out – erupting from their host’s abdomen to spin a cocoon around the caterpillar’s corpse, for pupation.  

Two more species of parasites nest inside H. horticola. The second is a “hyperparasitoid”: parasitic wasps called Mesochorus cf. stigmaticus. The third species is a bacterium, Wolbachia pipientis, which makes H. horticola more susceptible to M. stigmaticus.

If all three stowaways are aboard a caterpillar host, H. horticola kills the caterpillar before being killed by M. stigmaticus. The hyperparasite burrows out 10 days later – consuming its way through the bacteria-ridden flesh of the first wasp parasite and then the carcass of the caterpillar.

Yet somehow, 30 years after their introduction and in spite of multiple, significant population crashes among their butterfly hosts, all four species remain alive on the tiny, 10.4-square-mile (27 square kilometer) island.

In a new study, published July 7 in the journal Molecular Biology, researchers analyzed the genetics of the H. horticola population and its bacterium to figure out how these parasites achieved this incredible feat. 

Anne Duplouy, the lead author of the study, said that the butterflies’ fragile foothold on the island, and the numerous instances of their near-elimination from the habitat, is “a classic loss of biodiversity story”.

The parasitic wasp larvae eat the tobacco hornworm caterpillar after hatching. (Jim Lane/Getty Images)

Glanville butterflies feed exclusively on two meadow plants as caterpillars, leaving the species vulnerable to sudden changes in its environment, said Duplouy, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden.

If these meadows are allowed to become overgrown, for instance, “bushes and trees take over and the host plants go extinct under tree covers,” she said.

Glanville caterpillars are also strongly impacted by climatic events, such as drought, which can wake them too early from their diapause – the state of suspended animation some animal embryos enter to survive harsh conditions. 

“If the drought occurs in the [fall], when the caterpillars wake up from their diapause, they will starve to death,” Duplouy told Live Science. “Because under a strong drought event, their host plant cannot grow and thus they have no food to feed on to reach the adult stage, the population will crash.”

Despite numerous near-extinction events, however, the butterflies have survived, and with remarkably high genetic diversity – owing to the high genetic diversity of the individuals that were first introduced to the island.

The parasites are surviving just as well as their butterfly hosts. Duplouy gives two reasons for their survival. Firstly, Sottunga’s butterfly population may be isolated from populations of its species elsewhere on the archipelago, but its wasp parasites are not.

Both H. horticola and M. stigmaticus are superior flyers to the butterflies, with H. horticola in particular having an ability to surf on strong winds. Some gusts have even transported individual H. horticola wasps to previously uninhabited islands north of Sottunga, the researchers discovered in their surveys. 

Secondly, the wasps – in particular H. horticola – have an incredibly efficient reproductive strategy.

“The butterfly lays its eggs in clutches of 50 to 200 eggs. And research suggests that the wasp can find every single one of these butterfly egg clutches in the field,” Duplouy said.

“One parasitoid female will tour around the field and, daily, check the development of the butterfly eggs. When those are ready to hatch as larvae, the parasitoid lays its eggs inside the yet-intact butterfly eggshell. So as long as the butterfly is present, it is likely that the wasp will persist too.”

Hyperparasitoid M. stigmaticus wasps, which aren’t as good flyers as their H. horticola wasp hosts, are less well dispersed across the islands surrounding Sottunga and have resorted to inbreeding to survive, according to the researchers.

The accidental introduction of the parasites makes for a fascinating case study, but the researchers believe it also provides a clear warning about the need to understand both endangered species and the species associated with them before any attempt is made to restore any of them to a new environment.

The parasitoid wasps, for example, are commonly deployed as pest control in agriculture, so they are relatively well understood by humans, but a more elusive species could have wreaked havoc upon the new environment.

Despite the amazing survival of the butterflies and their parasitoids so far, Duplouy said that population crashes – caused by sudden drought – are likely to become worse as the effects of climate change become more intense.

“We are worried for the Sottunga populations, for the butterfly and its parasitoids. The last few years, drought events have been more regular, and the population crashes across Åland are stronger,” she said.

“The population in the south of Sottunga, in Föglö, has gone extinct a couple of years ago, and Sottunga has been a very, very small population for many years now, we fear we might see the end of it very soon. It would be a shame to lose it after 30 years of persistence.”

Related content:

The 10 most diabolical and disgusting parasites

Gallery: Dazzling photos of dew-covered insects

8 awful parasite infections that will make your skin crawl

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

#Nature