Painted Lady Invasion?

Paul Cherubini paulcher at concentric.net
Mon Nov 16 14:41:48 EST 1998


Dennis Burnette wrote:

> An alternate possibility is that someone is releasing them.  Here in the US it
> has become popular for butterflies to be released at weddings, particularly
> Painted Ladies and Monarchs.

Is there a mathmatics guru on this list that knows how many Painted
Ladies there would have to be per square mile of land before a casual or
experienced observer would have a realistic chance of noticing them on
any given day?  Perhaps it might take many hundreds or thousand
individuals per square mile, depending on the assumptions that are made.

It seems to me we need to have a grasp of the mathmatics of the
situation before we can speculate on whether or not small, sporadic
commercial releases, usually involving 24-48 individuals, could have a
good chance of causing one false sighting let alone the abundance of
Painted Ladies that was reported in Barbados: "regularly this autumn,
all over the place in small numbers".

Paul Cherubini, El Dorado, California


More information about the Leps-l mailing list