"A lot of the butterflies we were looking at are threatened by climate change. With the warmer temperatures, it will be too hot for a lot of them to survive in southern Europe," study researcher Andrew Suggitt, a graduate student at the University of York in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience.
The researchers were looking to see if the butterflies would move toward warmer or cooler areas of their habitats — like say a wooded, shaded area instead of an open, sunny field — depending on the temperatures.
"We thought the butterflies might be able to use cooler habitat to escape warmer temperatures," Suggitt said. "If they are doing it at the moment, they might be able to do that to escape climate warming." [Butterfly Gallery: Beautiful Wings Take Flight]
They analyzed data on 36 species of butterfly collected between 1994 and 2009 from monitoring programs in the United Kingdom and Spain. They specifically looked at the number of species and individuals in closed, shady habitats versus open, sunnier habitats. Then, they compared this information with the average temperature for the season, finding that higher proportions of individuals in the cooler, closed habitats more frequently in years with higher maximum temperatures.
In Spain, the researchers saw that about 75 percent of the butterfly species (25 of the 36) were able to make use of cooler parts of their habitats, but this was only a very small number of individuals — about 1.3 percent of the butterfly population shifted for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. Read the full report here.
Source: Jennifer Welsh, Live Science, Staff Writer.
