Cold winter = good butterfly summer 2010?

[Padfield]

Warm-blooded creatures suffer in the cold because they need to burn more energy to maintain body temperature and food is typically harder to come by. When birds and small mammals die in cold winters it is more often through starvation than any direct effect of cold.

Cold-blooded animals benefit from respiring less (and therefore burning up less of their energy supplies) when it gets cold, provided, of course, they don't actually freeze. Bear in mind that temperatures in continental Europe regularly drop to as low as those you are experiencing now (even if Moscow was warmer than parts of Britain recently!). Someone might correct me, but I don't see any direct threat to butterflies from short periods of very cold weather.

It was -21 degrees here on Saturday night.

Guy

[JKT]

Well... if it drops below -37 (IIRC), the ova of Epirrita autumnata will die ... which would be a long awaited relief for the trees in Northern Lappland.

[Matsukaze]

Apparently the Purple Emperor can cope with mean January temperatures of -32C (http://www.hertsmiddx-butterflies.org.u ... report.pdf, p.97).

[JKT]

Last night in Kuusamo: -36.9 degrees. If this weather situation continues in February, that will drop by another 10 degrees...

[Trev Sawyer]

Insects maybe able to cope with temperatures well below freezing but my new boiler can't
The condensate pipe keeps freezing, which trips the damned thing out. Most evenings when I get home, I have to climb up onto the garage roof in the snow with a stepladder and a kettle of hot water to thaw it out before the thing will fire up again. I've tried insulating it, but at present I'm struggling to get a permanent cure.

Trev

[Gruditch]

Problems here too, its been down as low as -10, the pipes in the loft froze up. I stuck a greenhouse heater up there, that seems to of done the trick. The Koi pond has frozen over for the first time ever, got air compressor with six air stones running in it now, fish especially large Koi often suffocate in an iced up pond.

Regards Gruditch

[Susie]

For the second day my firm has sent its employees home early and yesterday i became stuck in a snow drift on the way to work and had to be pushed out by four strapping chaps. Problem? Hell no, i love the snow!

[Lee Hurrell]

My boiler packed up on the 23rd December but luckily I work at a college with Plumbing lecturers and they saved Christmas!

My neighbour has just told me his heating is going now too...

Cheers

Lee

[Denise]

For the second day my firm has sent its employees home early and yesterday i became stuck in a snow drift on the way to work and had to be pushed out by four strapping chaps. Problem? Hell no, i love the snow!

[David M]

What I am wondering is that the tempretures being colder than it has been in quite a few years, will the butterflies be used to tempreture to be able to survive the colder weather than normal?

It'll be a shock for all the Red Admirals that have been successfully overwintering here for a few years now!

[felix123]

Quite a bit of ice and snow hear too which is great for me because schools has been off, snow ball fights breacking out but it is very very cold though.

Thanks,

Felix

Ps. Is it true that butterflies amit this kind of fluid to stop there own body fluids from freezing.

[Rogerdodge]

Dave
It is important to remember that no UK butterfly survives for more than one winter.
Thus no individual experienced last winter AND this winter.
However, their offspring will carry the genetic material and thus the physical and behavioural attributes that enabled survival in previous tough winters.

[Dave McCormick]

Dave
It is important to remember that no UK butterfly survives for more than one winter.
Thus no individual experienced last winter AND this winter.
However, their offspring will carry the genetic material and thus the physical and behavioural attributes that enabled survival in previous tough winters.

I know this already, what I meant was that because there has been not as cold weather as there has been in a a long, long time, species have been able to adapt to this and passed this on to thier offspring, but would thier genetic makeup be adapted for such a change in tempreture when they haven't experienced such cold tempretures in so long?

Take the species in Europe that is also found in UK. The species in Europe might be able to survive colder tempretures in winter because its species has lived with it for so long, but the same species in the UK being a subspecies, and not the nominate species and not seeing winters as cold as it gets in Europe for many years until now, would they be ready for such a change because their genetics is slightly different than the nominate species?

We will know in spring/summer how the butterflies/moths have been effected by tempretures and snow, but I was just curious to know if anyone else knew this.

[Susie]

There is heavy rain and flooding in parts of Morocco at the moment.

[Chris]

Dave
It is important to remember that no UK butterfly survives for more than one winter.
Thus no individual experienced last winter AND this winter.
However, their offspring will carry the genetic material and thus the physical and behavioural attributes that enabled survival in previous tough winters.

I know this already, what I meant was that because there has been not as cold weather as there has been in a a long, long time, species have been able to adapt to this and passed this on to thier offspring, but would thier genetic makeup be adapted for such a change in tempreture when they haven't experienced such cold tempretures in so long?

Take the species in Europe that is also found in UK. The species in Europe might be able to survive colder tempretures in winter because its species has lived with it for so long, but the same species in the UK being a subspecies, and not the nominate species and not seeing winters as cold as it gets in Europe for many years until now, would they be ready for such a change because their genetics is slightly different than the nominate species?

We will know in spring/summer how the butterflies/moths have been effected by tempretures and snow, but I was just curious to know if anyone else knew this.

What you describe could possibly happen, Dave. However, it would take thousands of generations. I'll try to explain why, but it's quite complicated.

A butterfly produces hundreds or thousands of offspring. No two of these offspring are the same (theoretically) as the meiosis process of producing gametes (sperm and ova) is completely random. In essence, each gamete carries a random combination of it's grandparents DNA.

In the example of warming winters, you would expect the surviving butterflies to pass on the genes that enabled them to survive the warm winter to all of their offspring. However, they do not. (I'm over simplifying) The ability to survive a given temperature will be distributed around the temerature "X degrees", so that 50% of individuals will be able to survive X degrees and 50% will not. It might be though, that 40% of individuals are able to survive (X+2) degrees and 40% are able to survive (X-2) degrees and so on.

Even after a bad winter then, there will be a population of individuals that are still able to survive the completely different conditions of the previous winter, or indeed the different conditions of the following winter. In order that the population were all killed off, the distribution would have to be very closely distributed around X degrees, or indeed the temperature of a winter would have to be so different from X that it left the population with an unsustainable % of surviving individuals.

In the instance where this could happen, thousands of years of warming winters would naturally select those individuals that can survive the increased temperature and the value of X would increase, so that in effect all of the population is now distributed around say (X+10) degrees. A series of sharp winters not seen for a thousand years would leave the population in tatters because of the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph.

This effect is an example of parapatric speciation. Quite often though, the change in temperature reslts in fundamental environmental changes as well that makes the habitat of a species in the same range quite different. The impact of this is that there are other factors leading to natural selection and rarely is a population only different on the baiss of its ability to survive a given temperature. I believe the polar bear is a recent parapatric deviation from the brown bear, to illustrate my previous point.

My head hurts now... it's years since I completed my genetics degree and trying to explain this without drawing a graph is perhaps a little wishful!

[Dave McCormick]

Well Chris, I can start to understand now, I thought it might have taken longer than just a few years heare and there. I'll read it better when I feel better, had a tiring day and my head hurts.

But, I was told that this start to the year was the worst since 1979 in Northern Ireland, and in that year is snowed on 1st May. Hopefully this cold spell will last until start of March (there abouts) then the weather will get warmer. Hope so as I have a moth night planned next weekend and I a hoping for good trapping weather,

[Jack Harrison]

World Domination Plans. Huh! I suspect that picture is of Cynthia jihadii

Jack

[JKT]

I agree it takes long, but doesn't the recorded changes in melanism show that the time scale can be considerably faster than thousands of years?

[Chris]

I agree it takes long, but doesn't the recorded changes in melanism show that the time scale can be considerably faster than thousands of years?

Ah yes, but actually that's a good example to illustrate my point that the population wouldn't suffer if there was a sudden environmental change... the non-melanistic individuals persist in the population in smaller numbers and would repopulate if they became favourable. I presume you're thinking of Peppered Moths? The mix of phenotypes in a population can change in a shorter time frame than the underlying genotype.

[Padfield]

Both forms of peppered moth are actively selected against in adverse environmental conditions, and the forms are probably determined by a small number of genes. Those two considerations lend themselves to rapid phenotypic response to the selective pressures.

It is not obvious that being able to survive a cold winter offers any selective disadvantage in warmer winters. It may be the case, but it doesn't follow automatically. So there's no obvious reason why a brief succession of mild winters would in any way affect a butterfly's long-adapted ability to withstand cold winters.

A propos, I am wondering whether we are seeing evolutionary change in the red admiral butterfly. In recent times it has increasingly been surviving the winter, and this has quite naturally been attributed to milder winters. However, the last two very cold winters have still seen red admirals emerging unscathed from hibernation. In Switzerland, we've just witnessed our coldest January for 23 years, followed by a very cold February, and yet my first butterfly of the year, seen today, was a red admiral. This is only the second year I've seen red admiral after hibernation here (the first being 2007, when winter didn't happen). One butterfly doesn't make a trend, but I note that Denise's first butterfly this year was a red admiral too.

Is it possible the butterfly itself is changing, towards being a true hibernator?

Guy