Butterflies Teach The Interconnectedness Of All Things

By Akela Talamasca on June 16th, 2009

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Kids love to learn new things, and science provides a constant source of new mysteries. One of the enduring lessons that we ought to be drumming into our heads is the way that all life is interconnected, no matter how niche or small. Case in point: the reintroduction of a beleaguered species of blue butterfly to England.

According to Jeremy Thomas of the University of Oxford and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, the large blue butterfly had disappeared from the scene due to the concurrent disappearance from the local ecology of a particular species of red ant, upon which the butterfly relied to raise its young. The ants went away because the temperature of the grasses changed, and that was the result of indigenous rabbits dying out, and therefore no longer cropping the grass. The rabbits died out due to a disease that came about from local farmers changing the way they grazed their livestock.

There’s no way to have predicted this “butterfly effect”, and its resultant consequence for the blue butterfly, and that’s precisely the point. Humans need to learn to treat the environment extremely carefully. We have a history of depleting resources without restoring them, and planning for the short term with no regard for the long term. We have a vanishing opportunity to teach our children how to behave with respect for nature, and we can only hope that it’s not too late. Who knows what other species might disappear, perhaps, forever?