Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times reported

At this moment, hundreds of thousands of Painted Lady butterflies are fluttering along one of the most astonishing migrations in the insect world: an epic trip of roughly 4,500 miles from the sub-Saharan region to the Arctic Circle, at a speed of up to 30 miles per hour. Over the course of a year, the butterflies will fly about twice that — more than 9,000 miles in all.

The Painted Ladies are one of the most widely distributed butterflies in the world, appearing on every continent except Antarctica and sometimes crossing the seas and oceans between them. Just last year, researchers discovered that a flock of Painted Ladies rode the wind over the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the northern coast of South America — the first documented insect journey across an ocean.

Read more at  Opinion | Meet the Butterflies Thriving While the World Convulses