Climate Change Impacts Butterfly Flight Season

Climate change is impacting species across the globe. Yet it may be impacting some creatures more than others. The flight season timing of a wide variety of butterflies is responsive to temperature, which means that warmer temperatures could greatly influence them in the future.

In order to examine the impact of temperature on butterflies, the researchers combed through Canadian museum collections of more than 200 species of butterflies and matched them with weather station data going back 130 years. They found that the butterflies possessed a widespread temperature sensitivity with flight season occurring an average of 2.4 days earlier per degree Celsius of temperature increase.

"With warmer temperatures butterflies emerge earlier in the year, and their active flight season occurs earlier," said Heather Kharouba, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This could have several implications for butterflies. If they emerge too early, they could encounter frost and die. Or they might emerge before the food plants they rely on appear and starve."

In fact, the monarch butterfly has already raised concern among scientists. Populations of this butterfly have declined over the years, and researchers believe that this decline can partly be blamed on climate change. The butterfly depends greatly on temperature changes when it comes to timing its massive migration. Yet this may only be the beginning.

"Butterflies are also a bell-weather, and provide and early warning signal for how other wildlife may respond to climate change," said Kharouba in a news release.

The findings reveal a little bit more about how temperature can impact butterfly populations. More specifically, it shows the importance of using old records in order to find out new information.

"Museum collection records are an under-exploited resource of ecological data and can provide a window into the past, and potentially the future," said Kharouba in a news release. "We should invest in efforts to properly database and centralize more of these records."

The findings are published in the journal Global Change Biology.