www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

This programme was mostly informative but had a lot of very annoying parts eg use of (clearly) dead adults positioned on flower heads, promotion of butterfly collecting, and sequencing an emerging adult from a pupa with a very worn one moving off.
Also seeing live butterflies and moths glued to wires for scientific purposes was rather disturbing.

Anything that promotes interest and awareness is in principle a good thing, but the programme, which was definitely over-long, seemed to focus on a lot of trivial issues such as the lady presenter trying to net them. It may just be me, but I find the BBC’s rather patronising and gushing style of presentation rather annoying.

The programme seemed to imply that the PLs were only heading for the UK. Why do they breed in Morocco? What is it that triggers the migration? Why do they migrate north? They don’t only take an overland route, as in 2009 we watched from the south coast of France as huge streams of them crossed the Med. It also failed to mention why some years are “Painted Lady years” while most years very few arrive in the UK (but I only watched the first hour or so, and may have missed something).

I don’t know who the Spanish guy was, but they seemed to imply that he was the leading authority on PLs. I can’t quite see how or why he thought parasitism can trigger migration. We spend a lot of time with one of Europe’s leading experts on parasitism (Pieter Kan) and it appears that all species suffer greatly from parasitism especially from wasps of the Cotesia genus, and many of them are species-specific in terms of which butterfly species they attack. There are numerous videos on parasitism on the Filming Var Wild YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGfTbB ... srj6CwLq1A
All species suffer, but most of them are non-migratory and many are quite sedentary.

It was nice to see Blanca Huertas of the NHM on the programme, whom I have met several times. Blanca is charming and exceptionally knowledgeable.

There is an open event at Rothamsted tomorrow night:
http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/events/inse ... ies-flight
It may be that there are still places available.

Roger

Hi Roger,

I agree with most of this - the programme did take an inordinately long time to go about not explaining whatever it was it was trying to explain in the first place, and was unable to focus on what it was actually trying to say (not to mention that some of the experimental footage I found downright unpleasant). Your friends from Filming VarWild do a much better job of explaining their butterflies' life-cycles in a much shorter time, in a large part by keeping the butterfly at the centre of the story throughout.

As I remember, Hanski showed that excessive parasitisation by Cotesia wasps was often a cause of extinction for populations of the Glanville Fritillary, in which case the only butterflies that survived from the population were those that had dispersed away to other sites; in subsequent years, of course, they could recolonise the original site where there would no longer be populations of the wasp. The situation with the Painted Ladies is, in a way, not so different, if we view their migration as a kind of dispersal which happens to be seasonally consistent, and their metapopulation as being continent-wide rather than involving only a few fields.

Terrible presenter, felt like I was watching Play school again.

Regards Gary

Gruditch wrote:Terrible presenter, felt like I was watching Play school again.

My thoughts exactly .

Tony M.

There were a few highlights but even I found it tedious in places.