Butterflies, the winged jewels for Ecuadorian biologists who measure climate change

Biologists and park rangers hold their breath as they uncover a fetid delicacy that attracts butterfliesthose winged jewels full of information to measure the effects of climate change in the Amazon of Ecuador.

The smell of rotting fish fills part of the trail where the team has hung 32 baits in the middle of the thick forest in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Production Reserve. Since August they have been carrying out a butterfly monitoring project with the support of the American NGO Rainforest Partnership.

Inside the nets, the park rangers place a glass with fish bait or fermented banana to seduce the adult butterflies, whose ephemeral life allows us to understand in the short term the ravages of global warming such as the extinction of some species.

In one week they found 169 specimens of these insects, most of them from the Nifalidae family. 97 were tagged on their wings and released. The rest are being investigated for the possibility that they are new species.

Biologist María Fernanda Checa directs the project and has been researching butterflies for a decade in the neighboring Yasuní National Park, a biosphere reserve with large oil fields in exploitation. Her work was extended in 2023 to the Cuyabeno reserve, in the province of Sucumbíos.

The findings will soon come to light, but Checa, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE), anticipates some discoveries.

The number of butterfly species that fall into traps has decreased by 10% and in number of copies “the decrease is very significant, we are perhaps talking about a fifty%”, he points out.

“It’s something that alarms us,” Checa tells AFP in his office in Quito.

“Deadly” seasons

Biologist Elisa Levy, whom AFP accompanied on an expedition, commands butterfly monitoring in Cuyabeno, a flooded forest with trees that grow in the middle of the lagoons.

While slapping the air to scare away the mosquitoes, Levy gives instructions to the park rangers of the Ministry of the Environment and a student.

“Don’t touch the wings, they flake off (…) it’s like skinning them,” warns the team, who returns to the rainforest every two months in search of butterflies.

The researchers hold the abdomen of the trapped specimens with their hands, gently blow on their torso so that they collect their legs and with tweezers they separate their wings.

Bright reds and blues then unfold, markings that simulate eyes and patterns similar to jaguar spots or zebra stripes. Others look like glass.

The butterflies are “bioindicators”, that is to say “very sensitive, even to small changes in the ecosystem” for their life cycle that begins when they are eggs, then caterpillars, and then a brief adult life, says Checa. The dry seasons “they are deadly”he points out.

Domino effect

Levy explains the ripple effect of the climate crisis on the ecosystem. “If the host plant (on which the caterpillar feeds) does not adapt to these changes in climate, the butterfly cannot survive.”, he comments.

In Ecuador, a small but megadiverse country, there are nearly 4,000 species of butterflies, a number close to that of its neighbors Peru and Colombia, which are four times larger.

In tropical areas, butterflies have not adapted to extreme changes in climate, as in countries that have four seasons.

“If the climate cools or warms (to excessive temperatures) they do not have many opportunities to adapt quickly” because those processes take “thousands of years”Levy warns.

A 35% of insect species in the world are at risk of extinction, according to a document published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2023.

“It is a serious problem for us” for the functions they perform in nature such as pollination, says Checa.

And the most serious thing is that in very diverse places like Yasuní “The rate of discovery of species is slower than the rate of extinction.” Add.

Empirical scientists

Butterfly monitoring is done with almost surgical precision. Park ranger Nilo Riofrío is the king of the group because of his expertise in handling the fragile insects.

He is so skillful that he can even catch them in mid-flight without hurting them. In addition, he has an encyclopedic memory to identify them by their scientific name.

“A (butterfly) by a small color, a small feature, already suggests that it is another species. It is exciting”, says Riofrío, who has worked as a park ranger for 14 years.

The project also helps to dignify science.

The Yasuní lookouts, who have been doing this work for years, published a scientific article about their experience and are going for the second. ““They really are experts in butterflies (…) the idea is that they are like the protagonists of this research”says Levy excitedly.

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