Andy Adcock
Worst person on Birdforum
'The Great butterly adventure', looking at the longest butterfly migration which sees insects travel from Africa to the UK.
Tonight at 9 on BBC4
Tonight at 9 on BBC4
A very interesting programme and we learned that one of the drivers for the species mass, migration from Morocco, is escape from a parasitic wasp that preys on the larvae.
Possibly. It's mentioned but they don't actually present the evidence as such [it's "ground-breaking" and so we probably wouldn't be able to understand it if they did...]. It's probable in this case because [from memory] population dynamics of several British species exhibit strong cycles that seem linked to their parasitoid abundances. Here's a link to a ScienceDaily piece about the longest migration
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180613102004.htm
[Odd(?) that the programme's from 2016 but this is from 2018]
...Should also have added (and I don't think this is in the programme), painted lady has the largest known number of host plants for any butterfly: >300. This partly explains why it's so widespread...
Did you watch it until the end?
Unless I misunderstood,the guy who was studying them said he was preparing a paper and that he was confident he'd proved it. He even collected samples of Painted Lady larvae from Morrocco which all had wasp larvae in them?