smoke and butterflies?

Kenelm Philip fnkwp at aurora.alaska.edu
Tue Aug 31 15:19:24 EDT 1999


	On several occasions in Interior Alaska I have seen smoke plumes
from forest fires that were dense enough to block the sun. The butterflies
reacted as they would to a comparable degree of cloud cover.

	However, the presence of annoying (to humans) amounts of smoke in
the air at ground level seems to be ignored by butterflies. Last summer a
large fire near Chicken, Alaska spread its smoke across much of eastern
Alaska and the southern Yukon--but I found collecting unaffected despite
air that felt unfit for breathing...

	Also, note that when smoke is that extensive, insects have nowhere
to go to escape from it. The smoke plume from the Chicken fire was 400 miles
long and over 100 miles wide.

							Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu



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