It’s been 28 years since a new butterfly was discovered there.
A scientist was organizing butterfly specimens in a museum collection when he made a surprising discovery: What people had thought was a variant of a common species was actually a completely new and different butterfly! As it turns out, it may also have a very interesting evolutionary history.
“To me it was surprising that no one had noticed this before,” said Andrew Warren, the study author and lepidopterist (butterfly expert) at the University of Florida in Gainesville, to National Geographic.
In 2010, Warren was going through a collection at the Florida Museum of Natural History when he came across a specimen labeled as the Chryxus Arctic butterfly, but something “didn’t look right.”
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The specimen was larger and darker overall, its genitalia looked different from the typical Chryxus, and it also had bigger white specks on the underside of its wings, giving it a frosted look.
Over the next few years, Warren and other scientists from around the world worked together to figure out exactly what kind of butterfly it was. A Russian scientist sequenced the DNA from the specimen and found that it had a unique signature, meaning it was likely a different species. Warren also visited the Alaskan interior to examine more species, but unfortunately he arrived too late in the season to find any live ones. Luckily, he was able to take a look at some local collections.
It turns out the species had been hiding right under the noses of scientists since at least 1955, being mistaken for one of its relatives.
The butterfly belongs to a group known as the Arctics and it has been named Tanana Arctic (Oeneis tanana). It is the first new butterfly to be discovered in Alaska in 28 years and it may be the only butterfly that’s endemic to Alaska — meaning it is found there, but nowhere else.
Warren suggested that the butterfly could be the result of a rare hybridization between two related species, both of which were specifically adapted to the harsh arctic climate… perhaps before the last ice age.
“Hybrid species demonstrate that animals evolved in a way that people haven’t really thought about much before, although the phenomenon is fairly well studied in plants,” said Warren in a press release. “Scientists who study plants and fish have suggested that unglaciated parts of ancient Alaska known as Beringia, including the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska, served as a refuge where plants and animals waited out the last ice age and then moved eastward or southward from there. This is potentially a supporting piece of evidence for that.”
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The new butterfly lives in the spruce and aspen forests of the Tanana-Yukon River Basin, most of which were never glaciated during the last ice age about 28,000 to 14,000 years ago. At some point, two related species, the Chryxus Arctic (Oeneis chryxus) and the White-veined Arctic (Oeneis bore), may have mated and produced an offspring that evolved into the Tanna Arctic, Warren said in the press release.
Like most cold-weather butterflies, adults live for a short period of time, emerging in late May and dying off by July. The larvae take two years to mature, surviving on sedges and grasses, while adults consume nectar.
Since butterflies react extremely quickly to climate change, the new butterfly could serve as a “canary in a coal mine” for environmental changes occurring in Alaska:
“This butterfly has apparently lived in the Tanana River valley for so long that if it ever moves out, we’ll be able to say ‘Wow, there are some changes happening,’” Warren said in the press release. “This is a region where the permafrost is already melting and the climate is changing.”
Details of the finding are available online in the Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera.
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