Rescuers followed a trail of cast-away objects. credit – Colombian Armed Forces
3 children aged 13, 11, and 4, along with an 11-month-old infant, have reportedly been found alive in the jungles of Colombia after miraculously surviving a plane crash that killed all 3 adults on board.
Together, these durable youths stuck it out for over 2 weeks on their own, sheltering in simple hutches made of palm fronds and sticks and eating wild fruit.
Sounding like the beginning of a young adult novel series, the crash took place on May 1st on a route between the cities of Araracuara, in Amazonas province, and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in Guaviare province.
It took 2 weeks for Colombian military and rescue units to locate the crashed Cessna 206 light aircraft.
“We think that the children who were aboard the plane are alive. We have found traces at a different location, away from the crash site, and a place where they may have sheltered,” Colonel Juan José López said on Wednesday.
The units followed a trail of cast-away items, including a baby bottle, hair scrunchies, scissors, and plastic wrapping, to several areas where they are believed to have sheltered and found food to eat.
The crashed plane – Colombian armed forces
On Wednesday, the president tweeted that all four children, belonging to the Huitoto Indigenous people, had been located, but deleted the tweet after learning that the source of the claim could not be verified by the Colombian Child Welfare Agency.
For their part, the agency said they believed the sources were reliable.
“We are still missing that very, very last link that confirms all our hopes. Until we have the photo of the kids we won’t be stopping,” Director of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF), Astrid Caceres, told CNN. “We are not underestimating the information we received but we want to confirm [directly] ourselves.”
Several other sources, the BBC reports, say the children have been found, including Avianline, a local plane operator, and local Huitoto radio stations. The word is that they were found by one of Avianline’s pilots who landed in the village of Cachiporro, and that it was here the pilot heard they had been found in a remote location called Dumar, and were being transported to Chachiporro via boat.
Welcome back to Good Gardening! Last week, we received our first updates from our current gardening experts, the Sharing Gardens, and Monica Richards! We wanted to know how was the early season going for our good gardeners and if any early challenges were being overcome. We received emails from our friends on the west coast and this is what they said.
“We’ve had a doozy of a winter here in California,” said certified permaculturalist Monica Richards. “We actually had to evacuate three times due to the amount of rain that was going to hit our burned hills! Then after that we had over 3 ft of snow and on and on and on.”
Richards’ perennials have exploded into life thanks to this deluge, including oregano, goji berries, and cat mint.
“Personally, I am finding that I love getting my perennials into the ground in the Fall, mulching heavily and hoping for the best through the winter,” she said.
We also got an update from the Oregon-based Sharing Gardens community collective, which we will post on the Facebook thread.
“Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower,” – John Harrigan
Topic Week 15: Floriculture: All About Spring Flowers
Question 1: Do you plant or cultivate flowers in your garden?
Question 2: Which varieties do you find the most beautiful and which ones hardest to grow?
Question 3: What wildflowers bloom in your area?
Tell Us Here in The Comments… or, send your questions, tips, and photos to [email protected]. Join our Facebook Good Gardens thread every Friday on the GNN Facebook Page…
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Share your gardening photos and resources.
Garden jargon is encouraged!
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A sophisticated app generates shark attack “forecasts” using artificial intelligence.
The developers are taking advantage of a deep learning algorithm to compartmentalize over a hundred years of shark attack data to create a sort-of weather forecast for beaches around the US with an 89% accuracy.
Called SafeWaters.AI, they hope not only to save lives—their primary objective—but to help reduce persecution of sharks in response to attacks on humans.
The risk of shark attack is about 1 in every 3.7 million swimmers, and 60% (28) of all recorded shark attacks in the US have occurred in Florida.
As the developers point out, most consumers of news regarding AI see it employed for aspects that seem frightening or purely futuristic, such as deep fake video creation or self-driving cars.
But the ability of a targeted AI to parse out trends and forces in mountains of data lends it to working with all manner of unique applications. In this case, over a hundred years of shark attack reports are analyzed, with data points being whether it was a swimmer or surfer, where the victim was swimming, what time of day it was, what the marine weather conditions were like, and even whether they were wearing shiny jewelry.
credit – SafeWaters.AI
All of this contributes to the total percentage risk displayed on the app.
Currently, the project is being crowdfunded, with 5% of all future sales to be donated to ocean cleanup efforts.
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A man who suffered 29 years in prison for the rape of his stepdaughter has finally been freed with the help of a local district attorney—and the victim, who had campaigned for his innocence for 20 years.
The case went like this. Patrick Brown, stepfather of a 6-year-old girl, was found guilty of her rape in a Louisiana courtroom absent the victim’s own testimony. Instead, adults testified “to what they believed she [the victim] had said.”
Since 2002, the victim had repeatedly requested the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office to review the case and prosecute the actual perpetrator. Despite this, no investigations into her case were ever done until DA Jason Williams took office and launched the Civil Rights Division.
A thorough investigation followed, exonerating Mr. Brown. Williams then asked the court to rectify the case.
“Listening and engaging victims and survivors of sexual assault is a top priority in this office. It is incredibly disheartening to know that this woman was dismissed and ignored, no matter how inconvenient her truth, when all she wanted was the real offender to be held responsible,” said District Attorney Williams.
Brown was released on Monday with just a small box of possessions. The family set up a GoFundMe to help him get back on his feet. So far, it’s raised $16,000 of a $25,000 total.
MORE WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS ENDED:
The Civil Rights Division, said one law professor, is the only group in Louisiana actively taking the concept of “Justice” seriously, evidenced, she says, by the fact that they listened to the testimony of the victim and acted on it while others had failed to do so for so long.
“The State is actively reviewing the viability (of) charges against the actual perpetrator,” Orleans Parish Williams told CNN in a statement. “To say more on that at this time would not be prudent as it could jeopardize the case.”
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Quote of the Day: “Nothing can be done except little by little.” – Charles Baudelaire
Photo by: Christian Holzinger
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The Camino del Santiago is the ironing board of the stress of life—a way to find oneself and direction in life through walking, day after day across the Iberian Peninsula.
However an American and a Dane didn’t find themselves on a hike across the famous European pilgrimage trail, they found each other.
Kjartan Bergqvist, from Denmark, and American Loni Philbrick-Linzmeyer, both experienced the sort of listlessness that causes one to buy a backpack, throw an assortment of worldly objects inside, and travel the world—in their case, both to Spain to hike the 500-mile-long Camino del Santiago.
On their own paths through life at the time, it was something they both felt they had to do alone. He was a 24-year-old medical student destined to seemingly pour over textbooks forever, she, a 29-year-old schoolteacher at a crossroads after a tough breakup.
Both departed from the traditional start point in Paris within days of each other.
“It’s very open on the Camino, it can be as independent or as social as you want or need on the day.” Loni said, recounting her love story to Francesca Street at CNN Travel. “It was weird, it wasn’t love at first sight. I think I ended up forgetting his name later—but certainly there was a moment of, ‘Okay, maybe I’m kind of interested here.’”
That was her first thought when seeing the departing figure of Kjartan Bergqvist, whom she first met in a forested area outside the city of Burgos. Little had been said between the two, apart from a discussion of the weather.
That night, the two crossed paths again in the Camino inn inside Burgos, and they thought that maybe they’d explore the city the next day—which they did, after a sleepless night for Kjarten, and a coffee that morning.
That set off, as they explain to CNN, a difficult 24 hours deciding whether or not they would fulfill their original intentions to walk the Camino alone, or follow their connection, which was immediate and joyous, and walk the trail together.
As it turned out, they, and a Canadian named Liz, chose the latter option.
Commenting on how their trip evolved, Kjartan told CNN’s Francesca that Santiago, the endpoint of the pilgrimage trail, “didn’t really matter anymore.”
“Those three weeks felt a lot longer, in a good way, a very good way,” says Kjartan. “I was just flying so high—obviously very much in love, and it’s summer, and there’s no place you have to be other than where you are at the moment.”
After reaching Santiago, the pair decided that sharing contact info, or even agreeing to a long-term relationship, none of it seemed even remotely acceptable. So Kjarten asked Loni then and there, in the streets of Santiago, if she would be his wife.
This story happened 10 years ago. Now, Loni Bergqvist lives in Denmark and works as an education consultant while raising three bilingual children.
They used to often talk about keeping the “spirit of the Camino”—the spirit of waking up every day with a single objective, without any other considerations. But as time went on, they began to focus more and more on the future. There’s a saying that “the Camino provides.” The Bergqvists believe it provided each other.
This small sculpture was 3D printed without supporting structures. credit: Jiangnan University
In a warp-speed technological advancement, Chinese scientists have developed mid-air ceramic 3D printing.
The team from Jiangnan University has enabled ceramic curves to be freely extended in space without support, opening a panoply of additional applications for the already-widely-used technology of ceramic.
Ceramics are used at high levels of engineering technology in aerospace, computer, and mechanical engineering because of their structural stability, wear resistance, and high-temperature endurance.
The team uses a photo-sensitive ceramic slurry for the 3D printing mixture that almost instantly solidifies when it comes in contact with near-infrared light from the sun or heat lamps, as seen in the image above.
“The printed curves can be freely extended in space without support. The printing process is smooth and continuous, without the need for heating or cooling,” Professor Liu Ren said in the paper.
With the new slurry, Liu Ren was able to print ceramic torsion springs at 3.5 millimeters thickness which retained their shape in mid-air.
Using near-infrared light can solidify certain ceramic structures at these thin dimensions, even at right angles, instantly upon exiting the printing nozzle, removing the need for support structures that can impede printing efficiency.
They also remove the sometimes irritating and existing problems when supporting stands and arms need to be removed after the material has solidified, a not-always-easy process that can risk breaking sensitive printed structures.
The team also demonstrated the ability to create various additive-ceramic printing mixtures that would otherwise cause warping, cracking, and other defects in the finished ceramic product.
If the technology is refined, Professor Liu wrote in his paper, then the aesthetics of the created material could also be taken into account, and he hopes that future advances would help inspire the science of 3D printing further.
Saurona triangula - credit B. HuertasTrustees Natural History Museum
Saurona triangula – credit B. HuertasTrustees Natural History Museum
A genus of orange and brown butterflies that had been excruciatingly hard to define and separate has been called Saurona after the Dark Lord antagonist from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Any old scientist can name a species—there are tens of millions out there that have needed a name. But naming a genus is a rare honor—one in this case that fell into the lap of a fellow Tolkienite.
The Eye of Sauron depicted in the film adaptation of one of the three most-sold book series in history is like a cat’s eye, with white-orange flames around both the iris and the flaming exterior.
In the case of the butterfly which gave Dr. Blanca Huerta and Keith R. Willmott the idea, white streaks around the interior of the wings trace the path of Sauron’s fiery iris, while a set of orange tips on the hindwings serve as the flaming exterior.
“Naming a genus is not something that happens very often, and it’s even more rare to be able to name two at once,” Dr. Huertas, who works as senior curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a press release entitled “Fly you Fools.”
The second genus they are able to name was Argentaria which means “silver” and refers to the silvery profile of the butterfly’s wing scales.
While there are currently only two members of this precious new genus—Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera—many more as-yet-undescribed species are thought to exist.
The paper published on Saurona is actually the culmination of a decade’s worth of work attempting to grapple with the identification of a subtribe of butterflies called Euptychiina. These particular butterflies are “widely regarded as one of the most taxonomically challenging groups among all butterflies,” their study details.
“I work in the museum with the largest collection of butterflies in the world, and I have 70,000 little brown things just looking all the same,” Huertas told CNN. “They really challenge (scientists) because they’re very similar to each other.”
Utilizing the Natural History Museum’s collection, the team was able to parse 449 species split between 9 genera out of the Euptychiina.
“What this paper shows is that there are just hundreds and hundreds of species that we don’t know yet, that haven’t been named,” Robert Robbins, research entomologist and curator of Lepidoptera at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t involved in the study, told CNN.
“This paper takes a very difficult and large group of butterflies, and they just amassed an immense amount of DNA information over the years and just brought it all together… It’s a very fine scientific paper.”
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It was a rescue that police said had never been done before: hanging off the edge of a Staten Island ferry boat.
They were there because an emotionally disturbed man had inexplicably climbed out of the window onto a railing on the outside of the ship, seemingly ready to jump.
Then, after trying to reason with the silent would-be jumper, Officer Gambino who was roped to the boat from an anchor point above, moved like lightning to grab hold of the individual and press him up against the side of the boat.
“Some people were in dry suits and some were in rope harnesses in case he went into the water or stayed on the ferry,” said NYPD Emergency Service Unit Sgt. Darion Brooks. “We were prepared for both.”
Brooks told ABC 7 news that this particular rescue strategy had never been attempted before, but that the ESU trains for dozens of different situations, some of which have involved potential jumpers.
The moment of arrest was captured in stunning detail by a news helicopter, and the man was transported to a hospital where he could receive psychiatric attention.
WATCH the rescue below…
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Quote of the Day: “No two people meditate in exactly the same way. Improvisation is essential.” – Christopher Bamford
Photo by: Zoltan Tasi
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A pair of small portraits made, perhaps spontaneously, of Rembrandt van Rijn’s distant in-laws were discovered recently among a private collection.
Never seen before, or known in any of the Rembrandt literature, the portraits could be the smallest he ever made, and greatly surprised the owners who had never imagined the true origin of the inherited pieces.
If previous sales are any indication, they could bring in between $6.25 million $10 million (£5 million and £8 million) at auction.
Dated to 1635, the paintings depict wealthy plumber Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife Jaapgen Carels, who lived in the city of Leiden. Their son, Dominicus van der Pluym, married Rembrandt’s cousin, but rather than this being a distant and unnurtured inter-family connection, experts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam say the nature of the portraits show there probably was great affection between the families and the painter.
The family of van der Pluym held onto the portraits until about 1760, until they were sold by a descendent to Polish buyers, who then sold them to French buyers, who then sold them to the 1st Baron of Glenlyon, James Murrary.
“The pictures were immediately of terrific interest,” Henry Pettifer, international deputy chair of Old Master paintings at Christie’s auction house, told CNN, adding that the owners were also taken by surprise.
“I don’t think they had looked into it,” he said. “They didn’t have expectations for the paintings.”
They are set for a pre-auction tour of Amsterdam and New York, before a final stop in London ahead of the sale.
“What’s extraordinary is that the paintings were completely unknown. They had never appeared in any of the Rembrandt literature of the 19th or 20h century,” said Pettifer. “They are not grand, formal commissioned paintings, I think they are the smallest portraits that he painted that we know of.”
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Georgia State University’s Prison Education Project
Georgia State University’s Prison Education Project
In caps, gowns, and perhaps even ‘blues,’ 9 inmates at Walker State Prison in Georgia are set to receive their associates degrees for 60 credit hours of coursework done while incarcerated.
3 are graduating with highest honors (3.9 – 4.0 GPA) while the other 6 are gradutaing with high honors (3.7 – 3.89).
Organized by Geogria State University as part of their Prison Education Project, the courses included a variety of subjects such as environmental science, English, philosophy and ethics, and geology.
The GSUPEP program began in 2016 and offers college courses at Walker State Prison and Phillips State in Buford and is currently offering enrichment courses at the federal U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta.
By 2025, GSU would like to offer the PEP associates degree in five other Georgia penitentiaries.
“Not only have these students demonstrated that they are critical thinkers by completing a degree, but they’ve also shown tremendous character to seek education and follow it through to the end,” said President Blake. “The degree they rightfully earned can never be taken away.”
50 other students are already in the pipeline, something which Patrick Rodriguez, director of the PEP says will reduce the chances they will end up incarcerated again.
“I believe that we can serve all facilities here in the State of Georgia to begin reducing our incarceration numbers and the amount of people on probation and parole,” he told local news.
Georgia State University’s Prison Education Project
For most of the students in the program, the education they received is the first time they’ve earned a degree.
“I learned several things about myself throughout the course of completing this degree, but the most important to me is that I do have worthwhile thoughts, ideas and insights,” one new graduate said.
“My long-term goal is to use the skills I’ve learned and developed to make positive and meaningful contributions to humanity. My immediate goals are to help others reach their education goals and to help them learn how to make better decisions.”
Indeed, education is one of the best tools for reducing recidivism.
“This has given me a passion for learning,” said another student. “I never knew why someone would want to become a teacher, but I see how good it is to give back and now I get it.”
Using stereo cameras and lidar, EELS is able to create a 3D map of its surroundings, understanding the environment before navigating through it. NASA JPL-CALTECH
Using stereo cameras and lidar, EELS is able to create a 3D map of its surroundings, understanding the environment before navigating through it. NASA JPL-CALTECH
NASA is testing an all-terrain slithering robot to explore tunnels, glaciers, and snowdrifts on Saturn’s icy moon of Enceladus.
The 13-foot-long (4 meter) machine is called EELS, or the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, owing to theories that the icy-covered world of Enceladus may have a subsurface ocean of liquid water—one of the solar system’s best places to look for signs of extraterrestrial life.
For nearly 30 years, robotic rovers have retained the same buggy-shape and design, from the original Pathfinder Rover in 1996 to Perseverence in 2021.
But these have been designed to travese deserts like the Moon and Mars—covered in a loose mixture of sand and crushed rock known as regolith. Enceladus presents an entirely different set of challenges.
“It has the capability to go to locations where other robots can’t go. Though some robots are better at one particular type of terrain or other, the idea for EELS is the ability to do it all,” Matthew Robinson, EELS project manager, says in the statement.
“When you’re going places where you don’t know what you’ll find, you want to send a versatile, risk-aware robot that’s prepared for uncertainty—and can make decisions on its own.”
The autonomous robot is being tested in undulating sand and ice, along steep cliffs, gaping craters, underground lava tubes, and even narrow spaces within glaciers.
The robot weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms), and is made up of 10 segments with exterior panels shaped like an uneven screw that will allow it to slither along. Stiffer tread in between the joints will help it move on slippery ice.
It’s designs will include technology to allow it to make its own decisions about how best to move over any given terrain, since telecommunications with the Earth would take multiple days.
EELS Team testing in snow – NASA JPL-CALTECH
“There are dozens of textbooks about how to design a four-wheel vehicle, but there is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before. We have to write our own,” stated Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator.
However there’s no time to lose, since it will take 12 years for a lander to deliver EElS onto the surface of the moon.
Enceladus has become one of the most interesting bodies in the solar system. The Cassini deep-space probe revealed a variety of extremely interesting features, including an active molten core that powers icy geysers which eject plumes of methane gas, dust, and ice.
The core’s heat is believed to have created a salt water ocean lying under the frozen surface where over billions of years, the conditions for life to evolve on its own would be protected from the hostile world above and space beyond.
Even if it were never to see action in space, the robot is already being tested here among the glaciers of Earth, and could be valuable for getting to know our own world.
WATCH it move through various terrain in testing…
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For the pilot and conservationists aboard the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust helicopter, going out typically means scanning the bush of Kenya’s Tsavo National Park for injured rangers, or looking for injured elephants or calfs separated from their mothers.
But on the afternoon of May 3rd, their mission changed from saving wildlife to people during torrential flooding.
A tanker truck was crossing the Galana-Kulalu causeway, when the waters rose around the vehicle so fast as to strand him. Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s operations manager for their ranch in the area called the helicopter, piloted by fixed-wing aircraft pilot, Taru Carr-Hartley, to the scene.
Dwarfed by the angry river, the tanker had flipped onto its side, and the driver, James Rufus Kinyua, had climbed out of the cab and was lying on the door. Slowly, the pilot lowered the helicopter closer and closer to the tanker where the driver sat crouched in the swirling winds from both the flooding and the rotors.
“I was told he had been there since 10am, in extreme fear I am sure,” Taru Carr-Hartley told Nation Africa. “He was hanging half out of the window, lying on top of the truck, and I could see the windscreen was smashed and the whole cabin was filled with water.”
That’s when Taru’s younger brother Roan Carr-Hartley, stepped out of the helicopter and helped the driver climb aboard.
“I had to concentrate to keep the distance and height between the helicopter and the truck the same to give him time to help the gentleman into the helicopter and jump back in himself,” he added.
WATCH the whole rescue below…
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Quote of the Day: “We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.” – Virginia Satir
Photo by: Max Bender
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The iconically-strange platypus of Australia is coming home to a national park near Sydney 50 years after their mysterious disappearance.
Whether from a chemical tanker spill on the nearby Princes Highway or over-predation from foxes or cats, conservationists aren’t quite sure when and why the strange egg-laying aquatic mammal vanished from Royal National Park’s rivers, but they’re back now.
A joint project from the University of New South Wales, National Parks and Wildlife Service, and WWF, conservationists released 5, (or perhaps 6) females last week into Hacking River as the first stage of the reintroduction.
Kept at Taronga Zoo’s special platypus refuge, the 5 females came from the Bombala and Dalgety regions.
“We’ve put females in a week to ten days before the males go in, just to let those girls settle in without those males who are a bit bolder, a bit boisterous,” said Rob Brewster, an Aussie conservationist with the WWF. “Hopefully, those females have found that little niche in their new environment and they can settle in together from there on.”
Brewster said the collaboration wants to see burrows and territorial establishment among the river systems of the 58-square-mile national park from the females before they release the males.
Beyond ensuring that the water quality in the catchment areas outside Royal National Park is of the highest level, threat management teams are also working to ensure the platypuses are not attacked by foxes or feral cats.
“Royal National Park is Australia’s oldest national park and I am pleased this historic reintroduction will help re-establish a sanctuary for this iconic species,” said NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe.
Short-term indicators for success, Brewster explains, are principally any sort of breeding activity.
WATCH some of the reintroduction footage below…
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Elise and her dagger – Vestland County's University Museum
Elise and her dagger – Vestland County’s University Museum
A child’s imagination can turn a molehill into a mountain, or a stick into a sword.
That wasn’t necessarily required when Elise’s teacher saw the 8-year-old holding a “rock” she found in the schoolyard at Our Children’s School in Osøyro, Norway.
That’s because Elise had stumbled upon a remarkable find—a 3,700-year-old flint knife from the Neolithic Era in a country that doesn’t contain flint.
Teacher Karen Drange notified the Vestland County Council of the discovery and the archaeologists examining it have now told Norwegian news outlets they believe it originated in Denmark.
Flint was among the first tool technologies that humans mastered—a hard substance sharp enough to skin an animal and even perform surgery, but that didn’t require any knowledge of metallurgy.
In a statement, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist who assessed the tool, calls it a beautiful, incredibly rare find. The knife is now in the possession of experts at the University Museum of Bergen, who will study it for clues on life in Neolithic Norway.
Excavations at the schoolyard turned up no additional artifacts—an unusual thing for flint discoveries, which are almost always found in places like Neolithic burial grounds, flint manufacturing areas where people were breaking large blocks of flint into small blades, or game animal kill sites.
The Neolithic Age in Europe lasted longer than elsewhere. When whoever last owned the flint knife was using it to scrape animal hides, the Great Pyramids were under construction, and the oldest had already been built.
Elise isn’t the only schoolgirl in Scandinavia to happen upon an ancient weapon. GNN reported about the 8-year-old “Queen of Sweden,” who found an Iron Age sword in a lake in 2018.
Not to be outdone, 10-year-old Fiontann Hughes in Northern Ireland found a centuries-old sword with a basket hilt using a metal detector.
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Scientists completed a vast evolutionary jigsaw puzzle in 4D—and they discovered that butterflies originated in America around 100 million years ago.
They determined that it was a group of “trendsetting” moths that started flying during the day rather than at night, taking advantage of nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees.
That single event led to the evolution of all butterflies, and now scientists have discovered where they first originated and which plants they relied on for food.
Researchers have known the precise timing of the event since 2019, when a major analysis of DNA discounted an earlier theory that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies following the extinction of dinosaurs.
Before reaching their conclusions, researchers from several countries had to create the world’s largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families.
Using the framework as a guide, the team traced the movements and feeding habits of butterflies over time in a four-dimensional puzzle that led back to North and Central America.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since visiting the American Museum of Natural History when I was a kid and seeing a picture of a butterfly phylogeny taped to a curator’s door,” lead author Doctor Akito Kawahara, curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “This was a childhood dream of mine.”
Morpho butterfly – Trond Larsen / Conservation International
“It’s also the most difficult study I’ve ever been a part of, and it took a massive effort from people all over the world to complete.”
There are more than 19,000 butterfly species, and piecing together the 100 million-year history of the group required data about their modern distributions and host plants.
Before the study, there was no single place that researchers could go to access that type of data. To wit, many of the sources were books written by local experts, and not always in the same language.
“In many cases, the information we needed existed in field guides that hadn’t been digitized and were written in various languages.”
The team decided to make their own publicly available database by painstakingly translating and transferring the contents of books, museum collections, and isolated web pages into a single digital repository.
Underlying all the data were 11 rare butterfly fossils, without which the analysis would not have been possible.
Unlike other insects, butterflies are rarely preserved in the fossil record due to their paper-thin wings and threadlike, gossamer hairs.
The few that are can be used as calibration points on genetic trees, allowing researchers to record the timing of key evolutionary events.
The results show that some groups traveled over vast distances while others seem to have stayed in one place, remaining stationary while continents, mountains, and rivers moved around them.
Dr. Kawahara says butterflies first appeared somewhere in Central and western North America when North America was bisected by an expansive seaway that split the continent in two, while present-day Mexico was joined in a long arc with the United States, Canada, and Russia.
North and South America hadn’t yet joined via the Isthmus of Panama, but butterflies had little difficulty crossing the strait between them.
“Despite the relatively close proximity of South America to Africa, butterflies took the long way around, moving into Asia across the Bering Land Bridge,” said Dr. Kawahara. “From there, they quickly covered ground, radiating into South East Asia, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa.”
“They even made it to India, which was then an isolated island, separated by miles of open sea on all sides. Even more astonishing was their arrival in Australia, which remained sutured to Antarctica, the last combined remnant of the supercontinent Pangaea.”
Farther north, butterflies lingered on the edge of western Asia for potentially up to 45 million years before finally migrating into Europe.
“Europe doesn’t have many butterfly species compared to other parts of the world, and the ones it does have can often be found elsewhere. Many butterflies in Europe are also found in Siberia and Asia, for example.”
By the time dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago, nearly all modern butterfly families had arrived on the scene, and each one seems to have had a special affinity for a specific group of plants. But there was one plant that stood out among them all.
“We looked at this association over an evolutionary timescale, and in pretty much every family of butterflies, bean plants came out to be the ancestral hosts. This was true in the ancestor of all butterflies as well.”
Bean plants have since increased their roster of pollinators to include bees, flies, hummingbirds, and mammals, while butterflies have similarly expanded their palate.
Study co-author Professor Pamela Soltis, a Florida Museum curator, says the botanical partnerships that butterflies forged helped transform them from minor offshoots of moths to what is today one of the world’s largest groups of insects.
“The evolution of butterflies and flowering plants has been inexorably intertwined since the origin of the former, and the close relationship between them has resulted in remarkable diversification events in both lineages,” she said.
Written by Stephen Beech, SWNS news service
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During the record-setting blizzard in New York state last winter, a tour bus of South Korean visitors to our shores found hospitality with two locals—the Campagnas—when their bus got stuck in the snow in Buffalo.
Staying two nights, snow plows eventually had the Koreans on their way. Now, 5 months later, they’re getting the chance to return the favor.
Fascinated by Korean culture, stemming from a love of Korean food, Alex and Andrea Campagna are now in South Korea on a vacation to keep the fire of that memorable snow day alive.
“To see everyone in Korea again is such a blessing,” Andrea told reporters in Seoul on Sunday. She and her husband arrived on Saturday at the invitation of the Korea Tourism Organization.
The organization wasn’t the only one who wanted to thank Alex for the cross-Pacific act of kindness, because when the story went viral on social media following reporting from The New York Times and Good News Network, many Korean businesses wanted to reward the couple.
credit the Korean Tourist Organization
“They made us really feel at home. After our memorable time together, I thought I should do good deeds for others too,” said Scott Park, one of the tour group who the Campagnas went to see, and who turned for to their interview.
One of the fonder memories was all the Korean food cooked by the sheltering tourists after discovering a wealth of authentic Korean ingredients and crockery in the Campagna household.
“I think with how difficult things have been with COVID, after so much sadness, pain and losses, the world was hungry for a heartwarming story. I think that’s why the story resonated with so many people,” Andrea told the Korea Herald.
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