Red, Red Wings

Brilliantly-coloured butterflies have miraculous births SANGEETA DHANUKA Manager, Piramal Healthcare, Mumbai ONE OF the most miraculous sights in nature is the lifecycle of the butterfly — it goes through a complete metamorphosis as it passes through four distinct stages: egg, caterpillar, pupa and adult butterfly. Let me share my own experience with rearing butterflies on my window sill. Illustration: ANAND NAOREM About four years ago, someone gifted me a pupa of the Red Pierrot butterfly. A pupa is that stage in the lifecycle of a butterfly after which the adult emerges. As I watched the pupa, one day at a time, the wait was agonising. Eventually, on day nine, its colour changed from white to black and I knew the birth was near. I checked on it several times that night, with no luck! By morning, the pupa was transparent and the colours of its wings were visible. At noon, the pupal case burst open and out crawled the beauty, struggling to find its feet. It had two black forewings and two red hind wings on the upper side, while the underside was white with black dots; a black and red margin to the wings was interspersed with white dots. I filmed the event until the newborn fluttered off, confidently, first onto a plant on my window and then out into its world. I then bought a Kalanchoe plant for my window. This is the plant on which these butterflies lay their eggs: most butterflies have specific plants from which they take their nectar and specific plants on which eggs are laid for the caterpillars to feed on. It took a patient three-month wait before my Kalanchoe flowered. Then, within no time, I saw tiny eggs on the leaves, soon followed by tiny caterpillars. Caterpillars feed voraciously; they are virtually eating machines. Soon, not much of my plant remained! The caterpillar sheds its skin three to four times during its development, during which process it temporarily stops eating. This stage is called the instar. Ten to 15 days later, the first pupa formed and I stored it carefully in an openmouthed container, lest the birds should take it away. After thus removing a few more pupae to safety, I stopped, reasoning with myself that I was interfering with the ways of nature. Nature has its own way of balancing things and the food chain would be imbalanced if all organisms had a 100 percent survival rate. However, I did watch and count them several times a day, to reassure myself that they were all safe. I had 25 of them now! Soon, one after the other, the pupae began to hatch — sometimes one a day, at other times two or even three. Over a period of 10 days, I saw 25 Red Pierrots come to life and take their first flight into the world from my window. A few days after all the births were through, I saw a Common Mormon butterfly laying eggs on my curry leaf plant. These caterpillars grew much larger than the Red Pierrots. Naturally, therefore, there was a higher risk of attack. I allowed nature to follow its course and four of the eight pupae were eaten by birds. These simple joys of nature bring with them immense pleasure; they sooth our frayed nerves, all the while teaching us the ways of life. For those interested in attracting butterflies to their windows or gardens, you can grow plants like Pentas, Ixora, Marigold, Petunia, Sadaphuli, Jatropha, Aster, Lemon grass, Plumbago and Heliotropium — and watch as various varieties of butterflies arrive to suck their nectar. Or, if you want to watch the lifecycle of a butterfly at first hand, try planting Kalanchoe, Curry Leaf, Passiflora, Bryophyllum or Calotropis, and wait for the butterflies to come and lay their eggs, and watch their metamorphosis. Remember, butterflies usually lay eggs towards the end of the monsoon, and continue right up to February. The creature may not emerge from the pupa for months together, depending on the species and on whether the conditions are favourable for its survival, though this occurs only in extreme climatic areas. Go ahead and observe the miracle of nature — it will humble you for sure; albeit delightfully. •

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Moths or butterflies retain what they learned as caterpillars

Wed, Mar 5 01:35 PM

Washington, Mar 5 (ANI): It's well known that butterflies and moths undergo a prominent metamorphosis - from crawling caterpillars to winged adults. Now, researchers at Georgetown University have found that a physical change in appearance doesn't necessarily change memories formed at the larval or caterpillar stage.

It was found that tobacco hornworm caterpillars could be trained to avoid specific odours delivered in association with a mild shock. After emerging from the pupae, adult moths also avoided the odours, showing that they retained their larval memory.

This study, led by Martha Weiss, an associate professor of Biology at Georgetown University, is the first to demonstrate conclusively that associative memory can be retained through metamorphosis in Lepidoptera, the order of insects that includes moths and butterflies. This study also leads to further new questions about the organization and persistence of the central nervous system during metamorphosis.

"The intriguing idea that a caterpillar's experiences can persist in the adult butterfly or moth captures the imagination, as it challenges a broadly-held view of metamorphosis -- that the larva essentially turns to soup and its components are entirely rebuilt as a butterfly," said Weiss.

"Scientists have been interested in whether memory can survive metamorphosis for over a hundred years," says Doug Blackiston, one of the authors of the study.

During the pupal stage, the brain and nervous system of caterpillars undergo drastic reorganization and it's still not clear if memory could survive such dramatic changes.

These findings indicate that the retention of memory relies on the maturity of the developing caterpillars' brains.

Caterpillars younger than three weeks of age learned to avoid an odour, but were not able to recall the information as adults, whereas older caterpillars, conditioned in the final larval stage before pupation, learned to avoid the odour and recalled the information as adults.

Besides, these results have both ecological and evolutionary implications, as retention of memory through metamorphosis could allow a female butterfly or other insect to lay her eggs on the type of host plant that she herself had fed on as a larva. This behaviour could actually shape habitat selection and eventually lead to development of a new species.

The findings are published in the recent edition of the journal PLoS ONE. (ANI)

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Butterflies trick ants into raising young

Similar larvae fool ants into caring for offspring in their colonies

	A caterpillar is carried back to a nest by a foraging worker ant. View related photos
David Nash

WASHINGTON - Call it the cuckoo of butterflies. Like the well-known birds, the Alcon blue butterfly has found a way to get others to raise its offspring. Researchers in Denmark report that the large blue butterfly has managed to produce larvae with a chemical coating similar to that of the local Myrmica rubra ants.

The butterflies deposit their larvae on marsh gentian plants where exploring ants find them, identify the chemical coating, and take the butterfly larvae back to the ant colony and feed them until they grow up and leave, the researchers report in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

The researchers, led by David R. Nash of the University of Copenhagen, added that elsewhere in Europe the Alcon butterfly uses a different ant species to raise its young.

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