Painted Lady Butterflies

Can you remember the first film you saw at the Cinema? I can it was Bambi and my Grandmother too me and the siblings to the movie theatre. It was in this same theatre a few years latter that I was captivated by a film about Monarch Butterflies, I was nine or ten. So that was the start of my fascination with them.

As I grew older I learned more about their remarkable migration journey and that the adults that arrive in the lower forty eight, are not the same adults that overwintered in Mexico. They will have several breeding cycles on the way, migrating to the lush milkweed the larvae feed on as spring progresses.

As I educated myself about the Butterflies that we have in Britain, I discovered that there are species in Europe that have a similar remarkable habit of going through several short life cycles to enable the insects to cover the thousands of miles that they travel from Africa to Europe.

While birds regularly make that remarkable migration, and many of the summer birds in Britain are African birds. But for butterflies to make that journey really does stretch the mind. Also while bird migration is relatively well understood, I have guide books on birds that are twenty and thirty years old that show that no one knew exactly where some of these birds went in winter.

With butterflies like the Painted Lady it has only been in the last few years that it has been discovered that this butterfly make a journey that is remarkably similar to the Monarch.

This year though something even more remarkable has happened. As extraordinary numbers of Painted Lady Butterflies have migrated to Britain this year, about a million of them. As I am up in the north east of England I was unable to witness the migration of them on the south coast were people were reporting clouds of thousands at I time flying onto the shore, having seen the film of the Monarchs, I can paint that image in my minds eye.

However, as this has been the first time in living memory that the Painted Lady Butterflies have migrated in such numbers to Britain gives scientists the unique opportunity to learn more about their return migration to Africa. While in previous years when the insects were only coming as far as central Europe, the final brood of the year would produce adults that are slightly larger with a different morphology to make the journey back in a single flight. Now even making that journey from central Europe sounds impossible. While small birds can and do travel that far, a fragile insect making such a flight sounds impossible. But that is what they do, or is it? Researchers want to discover if the Painted Lady breeds on the way south so that as happens with Monarchs, the Butterflies seen in Europe are not the same ones that arrive in Africa.

The point is no one knows for sure, so if this is discovered this year then I will report back. But even so it is just a remarkable story.