There are times when you can cross the Atlantic on wind power without stopping. In 2016, Stan Honey, the inventor of car navigation, took a 100-foot sailboat across the Atlantic without tacking, knocking 27 hours off the previous time.[1] They kept the crew on standby until wind conditions were perfect, then set sail.
The butterflies were lucky. There must be many others that didn't make it.
Over a decade ago, a snowy owl made its way to the island of Oahu on its own. Sadly, it had to be killed because it arrived near Honolulu’s international airport and could not captured by animal control. An autopsy revealed that this owl had expended so much energy crossing the pacific that it almost certainly would have died of exhaustion within a few hours of its arrival. But, it still made it.
Hawaii has its own species of Owl. Their ancestors must have made a similar journey and had just enough luck to survive and establish a population there.
I’m fascinated by this. How did it happen? No owls migrate to Hawaii. Did this one get lost in a storm? Was it sheer luck that this owl picked the right direction while flying over the open ocean to end up finding Oahu? Do some owls just feel an urge to pick a direction and just keep flying? Was this one owl’s magnificent flight the result of some undescribed phenomenon?
Perhaps there is some rare instinct which inspires an individual to go on a suicidal journey into the unknown. A species sacrificing an individual to make the gamble that it will end up in some far flung biome and establishing itself there.
The flip side of this story is realizing just how many more snowy owls must have ended up over the Pacific Ocean and kept flying until they unceremoniously perished amongst the waves.
Besides from the impact of bacteria on entrepreneurship, the behavior of exploring/foraging bees[2], I think the most likely reason is actually losing one or more senses and relying on other senses which happen to lead you to travel in straight lines (e.g. magnetic) - just as moths use the Moon to travel very far in a straight line. Why these journeys begin and end is another question. Serotonin and dopamine might be involved.
That has been ruled out based on the results of the autopsy. Furthermore, Hawaii has severe restrictions on the import of exotic animals as pets and it is unlikely someone would have smuggled one in just to end up releasing it in urban Honolulu.
Once I had this vision in a strong ayahuasca trip...
I met "Mother Nature", but it wasn't the feminine caring image you'd think of. It was an unstoppable force of life that did not had any caring of right or wrong. It only wanted to create more life. It had more a feeling of millions of beings crawling over each other, like a beehive or ants nests. Just devouring everything with "life".
Like a "Squiggle Maximizer" with a vengeance and attitude. It was awesome, but made me seriously reconsider the "sacredness" of life.
> but made me seriously reconsider the "sacredness" of life
When I think of life mattering, I think of the individual, not life in general.
I think nature is quite cruel and there's very little about nature to suggest that the life of an individual matters at all, but to that individual, their life is the most important thing they have.
It's like the argument people make to vegans: if we stop eating cows, they'll go extinct and that's bad.
It initially sounds bad to think of a species going extinct, but the species doesnt matter in this case. What really matters are the individuals who make up the species, and they're living a short existing with a cruel death. No cow would suffer if we stopped breeding them and let the species go extinct, but people think of the species as a being that woukd somehow be hurt by not existing.
I agree. I did not mean to say: “all life is meaningless “, but more that the green/ecological imagery of ‘mother nature’ that cares for you and needs caring was changed for me. Life itself can be a terrifying force. That the individual feels suffering is an effective but brutal feature of Life trying to maximise itself.
We are all born in this system, and we should obviously try to minimise this suffering.
Abject nihilism is fucking lame, and I don't care whatever chemically-induced experiences you or anyone else has had or whatever value you think you found within them or whatever the fuck, but I'm frankly tired of pretending otherwise.
These ideas are inherently harmful to spread to other people so flippantly—think of the possible nth-order effects for five fucking seconds, and you'll see what I mean.
(Or, don't because nothing fucking matters anyway, right, mannnn?)
We need to learn to respond to such nonsense swiftly, or we're completely and totally fucked as a civilization, as a species, in this information age of instantaneous transmission of thoughts and ideas.
Your ideas with regards to this matter are horrible, and you should feel horrible for proselytizing them.
(But, of course, you won't, because nothing fucking matters anyway, right, mannnn?)
Only tangentially related, but giant tortoises are thought to have floated (they can't really swim) a thousand kilometers to the Galapagos from the coast of South America, where they later went extinct.
I imagine most of the tortoises that found themselves floating in the Pacific never made landfall!
Only tangentially related, but humans are thought to have floated (they can't really swim that distance) around fifteen hundred kilometers to the Galapagos from the coasts of Central America, where they later caused the extinction of Giant Tortoises.
That reminds me of that Werner Herzog documentary on Penguins, and the one Penguin that leaves to group just to wander off into the island towards certain death.
yes, the image of that lone penguin setting off to the horizon with (what i read as) resolution had stuck on my mind. perhaps i was seeing too much of myself in it (and i think many others do too).
I live in a city in northeastern Brazil where the prevailing winds blow from the sea to the land. From March to May, the air is filled with butterflies, creating a striking natural spectacle. Curiously, these butterflies mostly fly against the wind, heading towards the sea and seemingly aiming for Africa, despite no nearby islands. It's an annual phenomenon that remains a mystery to me... a butterfly on an endless journey.
Well, I certainly hope the butterfly has more energy after eating through one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges, a chocolate cake, an ice-cream, a pickle, a cheese, a salami, a lollipop, a cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, a watermelon, and finally a green leaf.
>"How is this possible? I cant even walk 10 miles without needing food. Where did the butterflies store their energy?"
Air is a very different substance at that size scale. It is quite thick and viscous. It would be more accurate to say that the butterflies floated across the Atlantic. Locust hordes do the same, and can travel thousands of miles via the jet stream. They are not flapping their wings to maintain thrust the entire way.
Try walking further: calculate a loop of slightly longer than that and go for it.
I’ve had a lot of fun doing exactly this as exercise in the last few years - picking incrementally longer “loops” of distance and just fucking going for it with a bunch of water or Gatorade equivalents :)
> Pantala flavescens wikipedia: Globe skimmers make an annual multigenerational journey of some 18,000 km (about 11,200 miles); to complete the migration, individual globe skimmers fly more than 6,000 km (3,730 miles)—one of the farthest known migrations of all insect species.
From the article: “We estimate that without wind, the butterflies could have flown a maximum of 780 km [485 miles] before consuming all their fat and, therefore, their energy.”
So they can fly 485 miles without wind? that is still an unbelievably long way!
Or for that matter, weren't brought intentionally by someone who traveled on a ship with the equivalent of a terrarium or something that would keep them alive that long?
I learned this weekend that birds routinely get trapped in the eye of hurricanes and have to keep moving with it despite being exhausted, for hundreds of miles.
I’ve never personally seen a butterfly glide past a second or two. Are they capable of long distance gliding? The alternative that they’re flapping their wings continuously for weeks on end seems almost unbelievable.
They flew the Atlantic. 2600 miles. Somehow stayed together. Ten at least made it, as a group, with tattered wings. To have it all ended by an entomologist wondering how they got there.
I'm fascinated by the idea that a group of butterflies made it across the Atlantic without stopping. It's not hard to imagine a butterfly that's been blown off course by a hurricane ending up on a distant shore. Maybe these butterflies are like the cockroaches of the insect world - they can survive anywhere.
This is incredible, would love to see a breakdown of the fat store and energy these butterflies would have required to make a 5-8 day journey. Seem impossible feat of nature, how do they stay awake and navigate!? So many unanswered questions.
It's rather shocking that they stayed together over such a long journey that included no stops. I tend to agree with the other commentators that they didn't fly the whole way to South America.
I just ordered this same type of butterfly for my kid to hatch at home. I’m not sure where they are shipping from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a non native variety being sold.
It's one thing to guess, or conjucture a hypothesis.
It is another thing to track down all the data, do all the calculations, and actually provide confirmation for the hypothes, and put it out there for others to confirm or not-confirm.
The former is just a guess in the wind (maybe worth a Tweet - "Check out this odd thing!"); the latter is applying science and is worth an article.
Did they actually fly? Or lean on the wind? Because recently there has been news of spiders flying.. not really flying but traveling through the air via wind
How do we know they didn't construct aeroplanes and fly in the comfort of business class? (I know that we're no supposed to sneer at the community but with so many stupid questions it's hard to restrain myself)
Feels like it's more likely they got trapped in a plane, ship, box and got there unwillingly.
I'm surprised as a scientist you can get to this conclusion
They explicitly say "this method is not perfect and still hinges primarily on educated guesswork". So why are they dismissing a completely possible explanation? At least they should mention that's it's a possibility
I think you have to read more carefully next time:
"To figure out how the painted ladies ended up in French Guiana, researchers approached the question from many angles. They looked at weather data for the weeks leading up to the butterflies’ arrival and saw that wind conditions could have supported a voyage from Africa to South America.
They also sequenced the butterflies’ genomes and learned that they were relatives of insects from Africa and Europe, which helped them rule out the possibility that the migrants had flown from North America. In addition, they analyzed isotopes in the butterflies’ wings, which can point to their area of origin—this suggested they were born in western Europe and western Africa.
Providing yet another line of evidence, the team sequenced the DNA of pollen grains stuck to the butterflies’ bodies. This allowed them to identify the plants the creatures had recently visited—Guiera senegalensis and Ziziphus spina-christi, two shrub species that only flower at the end of West Africa’s rainy season."
The butterflies were lucky. There must be many others that didn't make it.
[1] https://www.yachtingworld.com/special-reports/stan-honey-the...