New Philippine Butterfly Subspecies Is Discovered Thanks to a Field Guide

By Keith Anthony Fabro
Filipino lepidopterist Jade Aster T. Badon is accustomed to traveling to some of the remotest parts of the Philippines in search of new butterfly species. In August 2019, he made a discovery in a more unexpected place: a field guide he had published himself five years earlier.
In 2014, Badon even included an illustration of this Appias phoebe subspecies in a butterfly field guide and labeled it A. p. Montana, a known subspecies. This mistake, however, was what would reveal the butterfly's real identity years later.
It wasn't until August last year that Badon had an epiphany. While browsing the same book and after a closer look at the butterfly's wings, he noticed that unlike the true A. p. montana, this butterfly's forewing underside cell end spot was funnel-shaped.
"The one found in Mount Canlaon, A. p. montana, has circular forewings," says Badon, the president of the nonprofit research group Philippine Lepidoptera Butterflies, Inc. "I did not know that it was a new subspecies back then."
Specimens of the new butterfly subspecies, A. p. nuydai. J. Badon
He did some digging: he checked online and library resources and found no match for the then-unknown butterfly specimen. "What was more interesting is that in Negros Island, no [butterfly] specimens have been collected from Mount Talinis when I studied the specimens," he says in an email.
Badon and research partner Jacqueline Y. Miller of the University of Florida then published this "new discovery" in the peer-reviewed entomology journal Nachrichten des Entomologischen Vereins Apollo (NEVA).
Here, they unveiled the butterfly's new name: A. p. nuydai — after the Filipino painter, lepidopterist and naturalist Justin S. Nuyda, who pioneered butterfly studies in the Philippines.
A p. nuydai 's only known habitat, Mount Talinis, is a 23,564-hectare (58,228-acre) key biodiversity area in the southern part of Negros Island in the central Philippines, and is considered the province's "last frontier"; it hosts an old-growth forest thriving with thousands of wildlife species.
The newly renamed butterfly species is the latest addition to five A. phoebe subspecies found in Luzon, Mindanao, and the islands of Negros, Palawan and Mindoro. It's an island-specific subspecies of the Philippine-endemic Appias phoebe, first described by C. & R. Felder in 1861.
This butterfly species prefer the cool altitudes of mountain peaks, and A. p. nuydai is specific only to the peaks of Mount Talinis, where it was first seen flitting around Lake Nailig at an elevation of 1,578 meters (5,177 feet) in 2012.
In May that year, Badon, from Silliman University on Negros Island, obtained a research permit from the Philippines environment department to do a broader biodiversity study of Mount Talinis, a "potentially active" volcano. That's when he discovered the butterfly by surprise.
"We were camped on the shores of Lake Nailig," Badon says. "We woke up early to have breakfast, and as soon as the sun started rising, hitting the peaks of Mount Talinis, I noticed some yellow and white butterflies flying and puddling on the lakeshores near our camp. I grabbed my insect net and caught two specimens before we left the campground to trek back down to the city."
A.p. nuydai (above) was initially mislabeled as A. p. Montana (below), another subspecies of the Appias phoebe butterfly species that's endemic to the Philippines. J. Badon; A. p. montana image taken from Tsukada, et. al. (1985)
All the while, Badon was unaware it was a new subspecies. Its close resemblance to A. p. montana, another subspecies found only on neighboring Mount Canlaon, also on Negros Island, hid the butterfly's real identity for years despite Badon's trained eyes.
Since then, the specimens have been kept in a collection at the University of Florida's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, where Badon did his master's and doctoral studies in entomology and nematology from 2011 to 2018.
Studies point to climate change as possibly the biggest threat to high-elevation butterflies, which could change the distribution of this species.
"Some of the possible reasons on why they prefer higher elevation is that it is cooler," Badon says. "If climate change progresses in the area, making it warmer, this species will eventually fly to its preferred habitat. But if climate change worsens at a rapid pace, then there is a possibility that this species will have nowhere to go."
This raises the "need to study the high elevation butterflies to determine how they are adapting to the changing climate and environment," Badon says. "I hope to increase awareness on the importance of insects such as butterflies in the country since they are also great indicators of a healthy environment."
During their 2012 research expedition, Badon spotted only seven to 10 individuals of this subspecies; further studies are needed to determine its abundance in its only known habitat to be able to assess its conservation status.
"The peak of Mount Talinis still has forests and as long as it stays that way, the species will thrive," Badon says. "But I'm not sure how climate change will affect them."
Reposted with permission from Mongabay.
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
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<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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