The Butterfly Effect
The dappled morning light in a Florida garden catches the glinting movement of a butterfly. It hovers over a yellow and orange daisy threatening to land on an expectant bloom at any minute only to resume its apparently random flight and keep the rapt observer guessing. An exotic looking butterfly, with an exotic sounding name, the zebra long-winged (Heliconius charithonia) is a native Heliconiid butterfly with narrow black wings contrasting with vivid white to yellow stripes. Zebra long-wings are unusual in that they feed on both pollen and nectar and they form communal night roosts of up to 60 individuals.
The insect visitor seems to enrich the entire garden with its mere presence. Chaos theory would have us believe it does far more than that!
With one beat of its gossamer wings a butterfly could launch a chain reaction that weeks later shapes a monsoon storm on the other side of the world. The so-called ‘butterfly effect’ sounds more from the realms of eastern philosophy when it is, in fact, a central tenet of chaos theory where a small change in initial conditions, the beat of a butterfly’s wings for example, can have large consequences down the line. The butterfly effect was originally conceived when mathematicians like Edward Lorenz were grappling with how to understand complex systems like the weather, and it has been used ever since to save the blushes of so-called hard science in their struggles to accurately forecast the weather …a notoriously fraught occupation.
This small cause-large effect relationship between apparently disparate things has application in many fields …and gardens for that matter. Natural systems are more than the sums of their parts. It is the connections, the relationships and the interdependence among those parts that define the essential essence of systems. From this perspective, the arrival of a butterfly into your garden heralds much more than the chain reaction spawned by a wingbeat. It heralds the arrival of a key species in the web of life of your back yard ecosystem.
In a sad twist of metaphorical irony, butterflies are now being adversely affected by the butterfly effect! In a recent study by University of Alberta, scientist Alessandro Filazzola and colleagues alpine butterfly species are vulnerable to the impacts from relatively small changes in climate that can affect the distribution of plant species caterpillars feed on.
ABOUT GREG
Before coming to FAU’s Harbor Branch, Greg earned both his bachelor’s degree and his doctorate degree from University College Dublin in Ireland, researching badgers, a small mammal related to weasels, minks and otters. So, how did he end up in Florida researching whales thousands of miles away? Once Greg graduated with his doctorate degree, he moved to California in search of jobs. After facing several rejections, one person at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego said he had a small project on belugas no one was working on. He was shocked at such a unique opportunity to work with marine mammals. “I pounced on that,” he says. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”
+ Visit Wild Life Evolution and Behavior
+ and fau.edu/hboi/web/
Written by Greg O’Corry-Crowe / Photography by Colette Dooley