Wednesday, August 10, 2022

"We Don’t Own the Planet Earth, We Belong to It. And We Must Share It With Our Wildlife." - Steve Irwin

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Big Butterfly Count

"That simple pleasures of looking at butterflies in the garden is calming to the soul and spirit and good for us all." - Sir David Attenborough

Thursday, July 28, 2022

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity. - E. O. Wilson

Making power generation green and shifting towards sustainable solutions has been a top priority in order to fight climate change. However, greenest types of energies also present new issues for our local ecosystems. For instance, wind turbine technology is an important component in the fight against the usage of fossil fuels. But the windfarms can have negative impacts on the biodiversity due to the following reasons:

They can result in habitat loss or degradation. Creation of roads and human activity under the wind farms disturbs the movement of wildlife. Wind turbines kill several birds each year.
Wildlife is displaced from feeding or nesting areas.
Density and activity of birds is much lower in areas with wind turbines resulting in less predation risk. This has affected the food chain and the population of lizards increased.

To avoid these issues, wind farms need to be biodiverse friendly and this can be achieved by:

Selecting suitable location of turbines after studying bird activity using computer generated models in order to predict where the projects can have the least impact.
Painting one blade of a turbine black which would allow birds to notice and avoid turbines sooner.
Bats are most active at periods with low wind speeds and so limiting generation to higher wind speeds can prevent their death.
Constructing wind turbines close to urban centres as that is likely to reduce the impact of turbines on wildlife.

A tryst with nature #windfarms

This post is part of Blogchatter's CauseAChatter

https://www.theblogchatter.com/causeachatter

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Butterflies and Climate Change

“To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!” - David Attenborough

Climate change is among the biggest challenges affecting pollinators like butterflies which are essential to our ecosystem. The health of our environment depends on their numbers. How global warming threatens these colourful, graceful and mystical insects?

Lifecycle of a butterfly is triggered by temperature. The climate has an impact on the butterfly's body temperature which in turn helps in finding a mate and laying eggs. Warm temperatures increase the number of eggs laid by female butterflies and the survival chances of egg as well as pupa are better. However, warmer winters make the larvae more vulnerable to diseases and fungal infections thereby decreasing larva survival. This results in decrease in overall population of butterflies.

A few butterflies have special diets and could feed mainly on plants which are more vulnerable to climate change. This causes fluctuations in their food availability. For example, Monarch butterflies mainly feed on the milkweeds. During warm temperatures, Milkweed plant increases the secretion of cardenolide (a steroid) which when consumed in large concentrations can be poisonous to the butterflies.

Some butterflies aren’t very good at controlling their temperatures with small changes in their behaviour. They instead choose a micro-habitat at the right temperature. Such species are likely to suffer the most from climate change and habitat loss.

Presenting a few photographs of beautiful butterflies from my recent visit to the Butterfly House.

A tryst with nature #butterflies #climatechange