in Ecuador, the decline in captured butterfly species worries scientists

In the Cuyabeno reserve in the Ecuadorian jungle, a forest where trees grow in the middle of lagoons and where, as told by AFP, Monday April 22, a team of biologists and forest guards hang traps in the branches to capture the butterflies and study them. These winged jewels, works of art of nature, are perhaps the most beautiful of insects. To attract them, researchers from the Cuyabeno reserve install glasses containing fish or fermented banana bait, salty and sweet delicacies that are very difficult to resist, inside nets. And yet as scientists note, not only has the number of species captured in 10 years fallen by 10%, but above all there are fewer and fewer butterflies falling into their nets. A reduction of 50% in 10 years! A dizzying fall that has nothing to do with the taste of fish bait or fermented banana, but rather with climate change.

A very important source of information

It’s not for nothing that butterflies are called climate sentinels. Their fragile wings are very sensitive to the slightest change in our ecosystem, and their ephemeral life allows us to understand in the short term the extinction of many other species. This is why for Cuyabeno scientists who study butterflies, without skinning them, they represent a valuable source of information for measuring the devastating effects of climate change. Climate change which after hundreds of millions of years of evolution threatens butterflies. Despite their sophisticated camouflage or mimicry tricks, such as patterns similar to jaguar fur or zebra stripes, they cannot do anything.

If it is on the shoulders of humans that everything rests today, the butterflies do not lower their wings. Simple Lepidoptera are capable of it, so why couldn’t humans have the courage for metamorphosis, which the Mexican poet Octavio Paz said was, like a work of art, a permanent possibility offered to all men.