MONTREAL -- The millions of black-and-orange butterflies that have carpeted flower beds across the Montreal area in recent days are waiting for winds to carry them south to warmer weather, according to an expert at the Montreal Insectarium.
Southern Quebec has become host to an "unprecedented" number of painted lady butterflies in the last ten days, said Max Larrivee, the museum's head of research and collections.
"It's extremely unusual," he said in a phone interview Wednesday. "This is the largest on record -- no doubt."
He said it's unclear precisely why the region has witnessed so many butterflies at once.
One factor that can explain the increase, Larrivee said, is that the butterflies arrived early this year and therefore benefited from an extra reproduction cycle.
Their large numbers, he continued, allowed the insects to cover a bigger territory than they normally do.
"In the spring they came really early and in really high numbers in April, which allowed them to take advantage of a much larger territory to reproduce, but also to reproduce one more time than they normally do," Larrivee said.
And while they usually fly up to 500 metres in the air, he said they've been forced closer to the ground by winds coming from the south.
Most of the painted ladies will probably leave Quebec to continue their southwest migration towards Texas and Mexico within a week or so, or whenever the winds shift, Larrivee said.
People often confuse the painted ladies with the monarch butterfly, which has similar colouring but is larger and has no brown on its wings or body.
And unlike monarchs, which feed only on milkweed, painted ladies can eat a variety of plants, which gives them a more expansive breeding ground.
Larrivee said high numbers of the butterflies have also been recorded in Colorado, Kansas and Wisconsin this year, and he expects other sightings will follow.
But while the painted lady butterflies have had "a phenomenal year," Larrivee said the same isn't true of most other local species, which suffered during a cold, wet spring.
"Overall some butterflies are faring well, some are faring poorly," he said. "The general consensus overall is that there are less butterflies than there used to be pretty much everywhere on the landscape."
Larrivee said he and other scientists are hoping to solve the mystery of the butterflies' shifting migration habits with the help of the public.
He's asking people to log into the website www.e-butterfly.org to document their pictures and observations of the insects.
