BUTTERFLY FOREST
Significance
Butterflies bring beauty, colour and motion to a still garden. These delicate winged creatures serve as a delight to one’s eyes and relaxes the anxious mind. Apart from adding beauty and colour to the garden these jewelled insects impact the whole environment.
Benefits
- Butterflies are major pollinators along with bees. Flowers provide nectar to butterflies and in the process of sucking nectar from flowers, pollination occurs. It is estimated that approximately one-third of all plants require pollination.
- Butterflies exhibit true health of an ecosystem as they are considered to be important environmental indicators. Their sudden decrease in population indicate some alarming situations in the ecosystem affecting all life forms.
- Butterflies exhibit true health of an ecosystem as they are considered to be important environmental indicators. Their sudden decrease in population indicate some alarming situations in the ecosystem affecting all life forms.
- Butterflies play an essential role in the food chain and food web as in their various life stages they serve as food source for lizards, frogs, toads, wasps, birds and bats, etc.
- Butterflies serve as educational tools for school children. The process of metamorphosis in the life cycle of butterfly is itself a great wonder of nature and topic of curiosity in younger generation.
Major threats to Butterflies
- Causes of habitat loss
- Degradation of forest
- Forest fires
- Urbanization
- Climate change
- Reasons of their declining population
- Intensive agricultural practices
- Changes in land use
- Extensive use of pesticides (including neonicotinoid insecticides)
- Pests
- Foreign invasive species
- Diseases