Butterfly Feels Effect of Warming

"In what experts are calling the first direct biological consequence of global warming, a delicate species of butterfly is being driven north through California to escape rising temperatures."

"Known as Edith's checkerspot butterfly, the insect is prized by collectors for the distinctive orange and black patterns on its wings - which, folded together, are the size of a pair of postage stamps - and by ecologists because it is especially sensitive to subtle climate changes."

Camille Parmesan, a research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis , "surveyed 151 locations in western North America where the butterfly has flourished."

"In research published in the journal Nature, she found rising temperatures were killing of the butterfly at the southern extremes of its range, while at the same time allowing it to expand to the north. Populations in Mexico were four times as likely to be extinct as those in Canada, Parmesan discovered."

"She also found that in those southern areas where the butterflies persisted, the insects had shifted to higher elevations where temperatures would be slightly cooler."

Stanford University ecologist Paul Erlich writes "This is one of the first and best signs that we may be getting climate change and of the biological effects of what may be a human-induced climate change."

"There is broad agreement that the Earth has gotten warmer by, on average, at least one degree in the last century, but there is considerable controversy over what, if any, effect that change has had."

According to Chris D. Thomas, a senior biologist at the University of Leeds in England: "There are major implications for agriculture, medicine, and conservation. This may mean major shifts in where we grow our crops, where pests live, where diseases occur, where endangered specis might be able to survive."

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