{"id":10990,"date":"2021-06-15T13:42:34","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T13:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/?p=10990"},"modified":"2022-03-09T10:02:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T10:02:14","slug":"planting-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/15\/planting-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Planting Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n

In April 1928, wealthy landowner and scientist Sir Charles Langham received news of a plague in Co. Fermanagh, Ireland. He rushed to the site of the outbreak\u2014a remote field in Enniskillen\u2014only to find that the locals had already taken matters into their own hands. They were burning the grass in a desperate attempt to eradicate a horde of caterpillars so vast that farmers were raking them up into huge piles. Some villagers had barricaded their homes with peat bricks, to protect themselves against the onslaught of larvae. Langham wrote: \u201cit would be an exaggeration to say the field was black with them but not very far from the truth.\u201d He rescued no fewer than 18,000 of the caterpillars that season, and reared them at his own home, where they re-styled themselves into marsh fritillary butterflies. How differently might those Irish villagers have viewed the more fanciful adults of the species?<\/p>\n

The word fritillary means chequerboard, and you only have to see one of these butterflies to understand how the association arose. All the members of the fritillary tribe can be distinguished by a striking tessellation of golden orange and dark brown\/black chequers on their upper wings. But the marsh fritillary has the broadest palette of all. Its chequerboard pattern also contains hues of cream, making it easily distinguishable from its peers.<\/p>\n

Populations of marsh fritillary can vary greatly in size from year to year, following a boom-and-bust cycle. \u2018Outbreaks\u2019 such as the one recounted by Langham were a regular, albeit infrequent, occurrence in the nineteenth century (another example was recorded in Co. Clare by the Rev. S.L. Brakey, who observed caterpillars \u201cso multitudinous in some fields that the black layer of insects seemed to roll in corrugations as the migrating hosts swarmed over each other in search of food.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But times change, and in the years since it reached plague proportions, the marsh fritillary has suffered an alarming reversal of fortunes. Today, it is listed by Butterfly Conservation as one of the most threatened butterfly species in the UK.<\/p>\n