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.
93-Year-Old Butterfly DNA Confirms First Insect Extinction Case Caused by Humans in the US
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A Famous Blue Butterfly: Still Extinct but More Distinct
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DNA from 93-year-old butterfly confirms it s the first insect to go extinct from US urbanization
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Credit: Marta Alonso-García
In northern Canada, the forest floor is carpeted with reindeer lichens. They look like a moss made of tiny gray branches, but they re stranger than that: they re composite organisms, a fungus and algae living together as one. They re a major part of reindeer diets, hence the name, and the forest depends on them to move nutrients through the ecosystem. They also, at least in parts of Quebec, are having a lot more sex than scientists expected. In a new study in the
American Journal of Botany, researchers found that the reindeer lichens they examined have unexpected levels of genetic diversity, indicating that the lichens have been doing more gene-mixing with each other than the scientists would have guessed.