This Butterfly May Have Been the First Insect Driven Extinct by U.S. Urbanisation
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The 93-year-old Xerces blue butterfly specimen used in the study. (Photo: Field Museum)
Scientists say they’ve confirmed a decades-old suspicion about the loss of the Xerces blue butterfly in the U.S by the 1940s. Based on genetic analysis of a 93-year-old specimen and others, they say the Xerces blue really was a distinct species of butterfly, rather than a sub-group of another existing species, as some scientists have speculated. If true, it would reaffirm the end of the butterfly as the first known insect extinction in the U.S. tied to urbanisation.
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It’s been roughly 80 years since the Xerces blue butterfly was last spotted flitting about on pastel wings across coastal California sand dunes. But scientists are still learning about the insect.
New research on DNA from a nearly century-old museum specimen shows that the butterfly was a distinct species. What’s more, that finding means that the Xerces blue butterfly (
The butterfly used to live only on the San Francisco Peninsula. But by the early 1940s, less than a century after its formal scientific description in the 1850s, the gossamer-winged butterfly had vanished. Its rapid disappearance is attributed to the loss of habitat and native plant food as a result of urban development and, possibly, an influx of invasive ants likely spread though the shipment of goods.
Was the elegy misguided?
The Xerces status as a distinct species, as opposed to being a sub-population of another non-extinct butterfly, has been questioned by some for decades.
In a new study published in Biology Letters, researchers at the Field Museum were able to put a definitive end to those doubts, confirming that the Xerces blue was indeed a unique species, albeit one now also confirmed as extinct.
“It’s interesting to reaffirm that what people have been thinking for nearly 100 years is true, that this was a species driven to extinction by human activities,” said Felix Grewe, co-director of the Field’s Grainger Bioinformatics Center and the lead author of the Biology Letters paper on the project.
DNA Confirms First US Case of Insect Extinction Caused by Humans
A butterfly specimen collected 93 years ago gave researchers the DNA to prove it was a distinct species and the first American insect wiped out by urban development.
A 93-year-old Xerces blue butterfly specimen. (Credit: Field Museum)
(CN) The Xerces blue butterfly was last seen in the early 1940s in San Francisco. The small, iridescent blue insect, originally discovered in 1852, was endemic to and once plentiful among the coastal sand dunes of the upper San Francisco Peninsula, then abruptly disappeared amid habitat loss caused by urban development.
Though the Xerces blue is typically recognized as the first American insect species destroyed by urban development, questions persisted over whether it was really its own species to begin with or simply a subpopulation of another common butterfly.