Moths v Butterflies - Katy Brand, Jane Hill and Chris Jiggins

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Learn more at intuit.com slash ERP. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Ince. And welcome to the infinite Lepidocteraneum. Or, at the very least, the very, very, very big butterfly house. Lepidocteraneum. That's why I should have said very, very big butterfly house. To be fair, you can pick me up on that, but you were the one who said there's no way I'm saying that line because I won't be able to pronounce it, and now you've pronounced it in front of me, yet again making fun of the arts with your cold, cold physics mind. Lepidocteraneum. Lepidocteraneum. Lepidocteraneum. Lepidocteraneum.

Let's go to our guests who have not yet been introduced and will be in the phantasms. Lepidocteraneum. Lepidocteraneum. I've never used any of those words. Oh, no. We've got the wrong guests. Now, regular listeners will know that in our unashamed quest for a larger audience, every so often we pitch two animals against each other in the title of the show before delving immediately into scientific detail and thus faithfully undermining the populist conceit.

So we start off by trying to be like WCW, then we become an open university, so it's the equivalent of starting off with the idea of an illegal East End lock-up dogfight, but then actually it turns out that it's just a battle between which dog salivates first when Brian rings his little bell. And he does like to ring his little bell. Kind of like Pavlov's dogfight, isn't it? It's Pavlov's dogfight, exactly.

So, so far we've pitched bats versus flies, we've had dogs versus cats, wasps versus bees, which ended up pretty much being for the wasp, which was quite a surprise there, but it was a great argument. Tonight is a whole new cocoon of worms because we are asking which is better, moths or butterflies? Thank you. Just because this is Radio 4, is it which is better or which are better? It sounds wrong. Is it which are better, isn't it? Which are better? Moths or which are? They're plural.

Well, I'll tell you what, why don't we change the subject then we say, now on Radio 4 we ask the question, which is better, is or are? Presented by Stephen Fry. Anyway, today... Today we are exploring those most ubiquitous lepidoptera. What is the difference between moths and butterflies? How do they fit into the tree of life? And what really is metamorphosis? And who is the hungriest caterpillar of all? To feud over the fritillaries and tiger moths, we are joined by a lepidopterist, an entomologist and an expert on watermelons. I believe that's what she is. And they are...

I'm Chris Jiggins, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Cambridge. And I've spent most of my career chasing butterflies around the jungles of South America to study their evolution and their fantastic colour patterns and how different species evolved to look similar to fool their predators. So my favourite butterfly myth is that the Aztecs believed that the monarch butterflies were the souls of their dead warriors who were coming back to visit the living. And I'm Jane Hill, Professor of Ecology at the University of York. And my research is focused on both butterflies and moths, understanding how they respond to climate change.

And my favourite story about a moth involves someone called Bernard Kettlewell, who was an entomologist in the 1950s. At the time, people were very interested in migration. They knew that moths turned up in the UK, but they didn't know whether they came in one big flight from further south or whether they came in a number of jumps, if breeding and flying and breeding and flying.

So he was interested in this and he used the opportunity of the French atomic bomb test in the Sahara in the 1950s and then started collecting moths the following spring and testing them with his Geiger counter and came across a moth that did have a radioactive particle in it. And to cut a long story short, worked out that that's where it had come from. So he concluded that this was a moth that had come all the way from the Sahara in one go. And of course, now we have lots of other ways of looking at moth migration.

We know something about the amazing journeys that they go on. I'm Katie Brand. I'm a writer. Sometimes I'm a comedian, but not often. But my favourite story about butterflies currently is I have a tattoo of a butterfly on the inside of my right arm that I got for my 30th birthday. And I also have a tattoo of an anchor on the inside of my left wrist that I got a couple of years later. A couple of years after I got the anchor, I was interviewing a pop star for a TV show. And he leant over to me and he went, oh, your tattoos.

Butterfly and an anchor. What do they mean? And I was about to tell him and he answered for me and he said, is it freedom and stability and the need for balance? And I said, yes. That's exactly what it is. And so ever since then, I've been able to smugly tell people that's what my tattoos mean. And so that's my favourite butterfly. And this is our panel. As is traditional in something versus something, we have a boat at the start and a boat at the end. Could you raise your hands if you are for moths?

Or you could do a sound which would be more effective for the radio. Can I just say, I really love the way they turned on all the electric lights for the moths to put their hands on. Robin is, of course, correct. He would do better. But what sound would you make? Well, I'll tell you what, if you make a sound as you imagine a moth might make. Yes, this will be interesting. This might lose a few. So, who is for the moth? Moo! Someone's for the cow over there. And now for the butterfly. Moo! Well, I think it's currently the cow moth.

So I reckon, would the audience agree that currently the butterfly is in the lead? Yes! Well, it could all change, Brian. Yes, so, Jane, your job is to make the case for the moth. It's a really hard thing to do. I work on both butterflies and moths, but I'll step up to the plate and put forward the argument about why moths are just absolutely fabulous. And I guess at the end of the day, well, butterflies are just moths that happen to fly during the day. So we could say that this is a sort of pointless comparison. Pointless. Yeah, pointless.

Jane, to be quite honest, we should have done the research call with you before the listing was put in the Radio Times. Because it was only once it had all been confirmed that we were told, you do know the butterflies are just moths. So just accept that throughout, everyone's a winner today. Just welcome to the world of light entertainment. Yeah. But there's about 180,000 lepidoptera and about 90% of those are moths. So just on numbers alone, we should all be saying moths are just absolutely fabulous. The other thing about them is I think people think that they're drab and brown, but they're so colourful.

If anybody's ever run a moth trap, there's just an amazing colour of them. And I love the names of them as well, much more mystical than perhaps some of the butterfly names. So you have a Mervé du Jour, the Wonder of the Day, or the Burnish Brass, or one of the ones I quite like is the Old Lady. And also Mother Shipton, coming from Yorkshire, it has the image of rather charmingly what is called an old hag on the wings. And of course, Mother Shipton's cave in Knaresborough was where she lived. We've talked already about lights and about moths coming to light.

And one of the amazing things is why they're doing that. And that's because they can navigate using the moon and using the stars. And they undergo these amazing migrations where they just fly up several hundred metres above the ground. They select the ideal wind and they just go with the wind and they're travelling a ground speed of about 50 kilometres an hour heading to their destination. And then the final thing I would say as an ecologist, again, going back to the sort of 1920s and 1930s, there were people working at Rothamstead, which is in St. Holborn's in North London.

And they were running moth traps and they were noticing these really interesting things that got them thinking about really fundamental questions about ecology. So if you run a moth trap, you know that most individuals are just made up of very few species. So this idea of why some species are common and why some species turn up or not, and that led to some really fundamental understanding that we use today about patterns of relative abundance and about patterns of species richness.

And that all came about because people were interested in running moth traps and looked at their observations and just came up with these really, really interesting things. So moths are fabulous. But that Mrs. Shipton is run, Old Mother Shipton, it's fascinating because I understand, you know, there are some moths you look at and you go, isn't that incredible? It looks like an owl's face, so that would put off a predator. But the idea that you would look like Mrs. Pepperpot is a really, oh no, I can't attack that. It's a small old lady. How did that evolve? So now, Chris, what...

Well, I was going to show you my owl butterfly look. So it's actually a myth that they're called owl butterflies, the Caligos, but actually they never sit like that in the wild. They always sit with their wings together. So you never really see the two eyes, actually. So they look like owls when entomologists spread them out and stick them in a drawer. Which means they've lost the battle of the predator already, doesn't it? Kind of missed the moment, really, haven't they? Yeah. But actually in the wild, they always sit with their wings closed like that and you couldn't see the two eyes.

So at no point would that have been any use whatsoever, really? Well, I think there is something. These eye spots come up again and again in butterflies and I think there's something quite striking about just suddenly seeing this eye when a peacock butterfly, for example, has its eyes on the upper side and it flashes that pattern and you see those eyes appear. But these have got the eyes on the underside and so you don't really see them together like that. But maybe it's still a bit shocking to a predator to see that big thing, flashing eyes.

But Chris, so your job, you have a minute or so to make the case for butterflies. So they are all the Lepidoptera, that's true. And the butterflies are a small group within the Lepidoptera. And Lepidoptera means scaled wings. But I mean, look what the butterflies have done with their scaled wings. They're amazingly beautiful. This is a morpho butterfly, which I'm holding up here. It's got this iridescent blue colour, which you can just, you know, in the sun of the rainforest in South America, you can see them from kilometres away. So they're remarkably diverse in their colours and patterns and shapes of their wings.

And it's really because they've evolved to live during the day. So they've evolved to a visual world. So I think that's why we can relate to them because they see in the same mode that we do. And they actually have amazing vision. So we have three photoreceptors, which gives us our colour vision. Some butterflies have up to 15 photoreceptors, even multiple photoreceptors that are sensitive in the ultraviolet light. So that means there are whole wavelengths that they can detect colours and shapes and sizes and things that we can't even see, which I think is extraordinary.

And that's all evolved for them to signal to each other and for the males to find females. So they're very visual organisms. I think that's why we as humans can relate to them. So they've taken what moths do and just taken it to another level. So is that the primary difference? Is it just night, day, essentially? That's not a very satisfactory definition because there are some moths that fly during the day. And actually these owl butterflies that I was showing are dusk flying. So they're not quite night flying, but they fly when it's getting dark. So it's not a clear-cut definition.

But taxonomically, there is a group of the lepidophtha that's nested within the bigger lepidophtha that we call butterflies. To an expert, what is the difference? How do you decide? If you see a specimen you've never seen before, for example, you've discovered a new one. Well, they have clubbed antennae. Butterflies have clubbed antennae, whereas moths generally have just sort of pointy or fluffy antennae. So that's maybe one of the defining features. But, yeah, essentially, as we were saying before, you just kind of know, you know, those are moths and those are butterflies. It's hard to pin down a single defining feature for the group.

Basically because evolutionarily butterflies are nested within the moths, right? So they're not kind of completely distinct groups. I love that. It never sounds that scientific, does it, the definition of, well, you'll know it when you see it. Well, most of the definitions are they generally do this. So butterflies generally fly during the day and moths generally fly at night except for when they don't. And then, as Chris says, they have different antennae. And then, of course, moths have their pupa surrounded by silk, which is where silkworms and silk comes from. And butterflies generally don't. And then they have different posture.

So you'll see when a butterfly comes to rest, it puts its wings behind it, whereas a moth has its wings flat, generally. And, yeah, moths are generally hairier. You said about their eyes being sensitive to different wavelengths. So does that mean that the beautiful colours that we see are only part of the pattern to another butterfly? Yeah, no, that's right. It's more magnificent. Some of them have UV patterns which we just can't see.

Some of the yellows and the whites, for example, just will look plain yellow or plain white to us, but actually they have detailed and rather intricate patterns in the UV that we can't see at all. That's right. So, Katie, you are the arbitrator today. So at this early stage, and also because your tattoo, because it's all filled in, you could also pretend it's a moth. So it won't change, it won't mean you have to have laser surgery. Okay. So at the current stage, where do you sit in terms of butterflies versus moths, take into account the fact that that's actually a false division? Right.

Well, I don't know. I guess I'm leaning currently towards butterflies, but that's because that's what I walked into the room with, right? So I'm very much open to being persuaded. I also have a guilty conscience about moths because I went through a short but quite intense phase of cutting up dead moths when I was about 11. They were dead already, can I just say. Right? And I would collect them and then later on with a kitchen knife I would try to dissect them. But usually what happened is that it would just disintegrate into kind of moth-coloured dust.

So I guess I sort of harbour some guilt, maybe possibly a bit of resentment about that early on because I never cut up a butterfly because I never found a dead butterfly. I'm aware also though and quite seduced by the sort of mythical spiritual aspects of moths. You know, we're all now, I don't know, doing lots of spiritual things and stepping into your empowerment and, you know, leaving a glass of rose water by a full moon so that you can snog the boy you fancy. Stuff like that. You're really taking this away from the science. Yes, no, sure. I am. Brian's twitching a lot now.

Yes, I get it. I get it. But I just, I think these things are important, you know, in terms of our emotional engagement with moths and butterflies. So I'm a bit attracted by that side of the moth-ness. So we've got all to play for is what I'm saying. I do have a question about butterflies and moths. It's about the nature of consciousness. And I heard on the radio someone talking about butterflies. I'm talking about the way, sorry about the terminology, correct me please. Does a butterfly have a cocoon? Well, chrysalis, cocoon, pupa, they're all words for the same thing.

So the caterpillar turns entirely to pulp inside mush and then reforms itself as a butterfly or moth. Is that sort of it? I think there are still structures there. There are still structures. But what I was, what I heard on this radio thing before you leap in with all the expert analysis, right, which I am anxious for, but the question is, experiments have been done where certain stimuli have been presented to a caterpillar, to maybe bright lights or loud noises or whatever it does, whatever caterpillars don't like. I'm sorry, I'm unsure. And it had reacted to that stimuli as a caterpillar.

And then post-pulp and reforming as a butterfly, they showed the same creature, the same individual creature, the same stimuli, and it reacted the same as the caterpillar had. And the suggestion in this piece was that the consciousness of the caterpillar had somehow survived the pulpiness, the total goo, and when it had reformed as a new creature, the awareness of something that had happened to it as a caterpillar in terms of its consciousness was still intact. And I don't really know what my question is, other than, is that true? Yeah, there are structures, the adult structures already there in the caterpillar.

So I'm not sure about consciousness, but certainly, for example, the wings are little balls of cells. And if you're so minded, if you snip in the right place in the caterpillar, you can pop out this little ball of cells, which is going to be the wing of the adult butterfly. So it's not true that they all dissolve completely into pulp. They're already forming the adult structures in the caterpillar, but they do then dissolve all those caterpillar structures that they don't need anymore and reuse those nutrients to build those adult structures within the pupa. So it is the most extraordinary transition. It's ecologically extraordinary.

They just live in completely different environments and do completely different things. Because I didn't realise this either. I don't think Katie did, which is we'd kind of been taught that he'd become entirely liquefied and that all... And what you're actually saying is that whatever we want to call the consciousness, the, you know, the nerve endings, whatever, that that actually, if you found a caterpillar in a cocoon and you cut it open with your 11-year-old scissors and all that kind of stuff, you would be able to monitor certain features that had not been liquefied. That's right, yes. That's right. Well, thanks for dashing that mystery.

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So could you just outline the evolutionary history of Lepidoptera? Well, they're related to things like mayflies and caddisflies, which are also obviously what are called holometabolous insects, which go through a pupation stage. How old are the Lepidoptera? So I would say about 300 million years. About 300 million years ago. Butterflies originated sort of just over 100 million years ago. Oh, so they're quite ancient organisms. I mean, that's a long... The diversification of the butterflies roughly coincides with the diversification of the flowering plants, the angiosperms.

And their diversification is closely tied to the plants that they eat because really the thing that defines them ecologically is the plants that the caterpillars eat. That's what diversifies them. So they're tied to this diversification of plants. Perhaps we could explore that a bit. They essentially co-evolve the story. Yeah, there's this constant sort of evolutionary arms race between the plants and the caterpillars. And the plants are evolving these toxins and other defences. And so, for example, we study these butterflies, which the reason they're brightly coloured is because they have cyanogenic compounds, the little sugar molecules that release cyanide when they get attacked.

They get those molecules. They can either make them themselves or they get them from the plants that they feed on. So the plants have evolved an enormous chemical diversity of these cyanogenic compounds trying to evolve new compounds that the butterflies can't sort of deal with. And then the butterflies, you know, some species evolved to deal with it. And then they also use... There's one species of passiflora which has hooked trichomes, little hooked hairs. And it's just like Velcro, actually. You stick the leaves to your shirt and they stick like Velcro. And most of the caterpillars just get... They're pretty gruesome.

They get kind of caught up in these hooks and they sort of pull their cuticle open and they start bleeding and they die very quickly. They can't survive at all. But there's a couple of species that have evolved through really thick cuticles and they can sort of stomp around on these hooked trichomes. Work we're doing at the moment where one of the species that can walk on it but it can't eat it, if it tries to eat it, it dies.

But then there's one species that's managed to walk on it and eat it and it's got, you know, really thick kind of cuticle in its gut to deal with these little nasty little hooks that get into its stomach. Because you've got a caterpillar and then the butterfly or the moth, then ultimately, I suppose, they become pollinators. Right. And they're then happy. So the same plant might be trying to attract the butterfly at one point in its lifestyle but they don't really want to attract them too much because, of course, the adults are also laying the eggs that produce the caterpillars. So they have, you know...

It's brutal. You know, they produce scents and colours to attract the pollinators but they also, one cool thing they do is the plants produce fake eggs. So you don't want to layer your egg on a plant that already has eggs on it because the larvae are cannibalistic so that if you lay your egg where someone else has already laid an egg, you're likely to get eaten by the one that's already there. So the plants make these little structures that look like butterfly eggs to try and sort of deter the other butterflies from coming and laying eggs on them.

This must be sort of immense stress for the butterflies. I like to look in my garden at spring at two little butterflies going together like this in the sky and I always thought they were kind of dating or courting or at the talking stage at least and now I just feel like they're having a massive row about whether that plant's got fake eggs on it or whether they can lay it there. That's the thing about nature, isn't it? Where you hear all these and watch all these things and go, what a pretty thing doing pretty stuff.

When you first find out about what the dawn chorus is really saying, you go, oh, it's rather a rough night in Newcastle on a Friday. What's the dawn chorus really saying? I'm not going to tell you about the dawn chorus but frankly those birds are not as innocent as you might imagine. I think my friend Nick Rebel used to basically translate the dawn chorus as do you want some? Do specific butterflies pollinate specific plants? Is it very, very tightly adapted? That's sometimes true, yes.

It's very true of the caterpillars so very often the caterpillars can only feed on one species or a couple of species of plants and that's because of this very tight co-evolution of the chemistry of the plants and the ability to deal with that chemistry. So they evolve to be very specialist in the things that the caterpillars eat and that can also be true of the adults, the pollinators as well.

Yeah, and if the caterpillars feed on several host plants they're usually closely related phylogenetically, those host plants so there's obviously a challenge as Chris is saying to break down the defences of the plant and so once you're specialist on a particular group you probably can eat other ones as well.

Jane, how can we, because we were talking about the evolution there as well and I'm just wondering, you know, going back a hundred million years how exact or inexact is our understanding of what butterflies and moths look like because I would imagine they are something which within the record of what is left behind something like a butterfly or a moth there's a fragility to it you know, thinking about those ones that look like an owl's face understanding that journey how much can we know about what the butterfly or the moth of a hundred million years ago would have been?

Wouldn't look like an owl would it? Because there weren't any owls sometimes it could just be a bit of patience can't it? I'm not coming up this tree until but no, but that's what I mean is that, you know, so there will have been a point, you know, in all of these different changes. Yeah, so there are some fossil butterflies but not many because it's quite hard to preserve something with such a soft body and no bones and so on.

I guess we don't have particularly good understanding about that because there is just so little from that time and the only information we have is what we can infer from sort of genetic information now. Yeah, evolutionary biologists try to infer it from the present day species and their relationships but the patterns evolve so fast it's actually quite difficult, yeah. And you mentioned it earlier but the I was going to say it's difficult to talk about evolution isn't it? The purpose let me use the word so the patterning itself, the colours because it is tremendously intricate so what is the point of that complexity?

You mentioned maybe attracting other butterflies is there more to it than that?

Well these guys actually have a lot of mimicry they're brightly coloured and different species evolve the same patterns and they're sending a signal to predators that they're bad to eat so they're actually all there's two different kinds of mimicry there's mimicry where you're pretending to be something nasty and you're actually you're edible but you're pretending to be something you're not and then there's kind of a more mutualistic mimicry where you're kind of all joining in to send a common signal actually you're all nasty yeah so they're evolving the same patterns to send a common signal to predators but one of the weird things about these butterflies that we study in South America is the pattern that they have in the same species just changes rather randomly every few hundred kilometres so you go either side of the Andes in Ecuador the same two species look identical where they live together but completely different on the other side of the Andes and I think it's just fashion right it doesn't really matter you just want to look like everyone else it doesn't really matter what it is as long as it's kind of bright and gaudy and the birds recognise you so I'm glad because that's what I was thinking I was thinking that kind of moths are like goths and butterflies are the new romantics right so because you're mentioning the mimicry is that Batesian mimicry because I remember watching a thing of Batesian mimicry very much like what Chris was saying and to me it's such a fascinating thing that bit where you go you don't have to evolve to be poisonous but to evolve to look like something that's poisonous and that was the first story I heard I think of Bates and the research that he did it's very very inspiring you don't actually have to be nasty as long as you look nasty yeah people will broadly leave you alone it's the face I do when I walk past the Scientology centre right yeah just to not get given any leaflets not today not today so is there a suggestion here that somehow they're cheating well I suppose nature so often is a cheat isn't it that's the thing which is if you appear to be poisonous it takes less energy as such than actually being the poisonous creature but of course you have to get the frequency of those rights because otherwise birds or whatever's eating you will start to realise that that's not necessarily a good cue to being poisonous now you're ostentatious and gaudy and you're edible and that's not very good not really not what we're looking so that is why the new romantics died out the goth scene is still very strong so yeah I am I was interested to know something not science quite so science based maybe science adjacent I can't name any of the books specifically now but the number of books you know that would have a butterfly collector and it would always sort of signify something about that person's character or a sort of lost youth or I'm sort of interested to know from both of you as scientists where do you think that character archetype comes from well I suppose what you're really saying is like John Fowlesy's book The Collector is about somebody who collects butterflies and then kidnaps someone and tries to force them to love them and in Silence of the Lambs it actually is a serial killer who's obsessed with them so what we're saying is are you like more likely to kill I had a couple of gentler kind of literary archetypes but yes there is also this use of the idea of catching something beautiful and free and pinning it to a board and maybe that is psychopathic I don't know would you care to comment perhaps I could give an example to sort of counteract that which is the story of Lady Eleanor Glanville who is a real person so we're not talking about stories here and we have a Glanville fritillary in this country so historically she was an avid collector she was really interested in butterflies so after she died her family contested the will because they said she was obviously mad oh really I could turn this perhaps into an actual question come on it's a conversation I'm going to do what role did collecting butterflies and moths play in our understanding of evolution that's not the same question at all that's a totally different question sorry no let's no no no totally moves us away from whether they're killers or not no no what I'm actually asking is do you know what the first evidence or sign of humans mythologising or spiritualising butterflies is is it involved in cave art is there any did neanderthals do this the greek goddess psyche was the goddess of the soul and she was always depicted with butterfly wings okay but following on from going on to the side what role did the collection of butterflies in moth play in our own bed yes I think the fact that they're so iconic and that people are attracted by them has meant that people have collected them so we've understood them much better than many other groups yeah in the UK we have amazing records of where butterflies have lived over the centuries which is some of the best data sets we have for tracking climate change and how the impacts of the changing world on species distributions yeah so so museums contain vast quantities if you go to the natural history museum you'll see masses of butterflies and moths all which have been catalogued all very carefully named and the location you have this amazing amount of information going back hundreds of years telling you where those butterflies and moths were found and then of course you can look to see whether they're still there today and understand which species have disappeared which ones have arrived and understand a lot more about the biodiversity whether it be in the UK or whether it be elsewhere in the world so although the sort of fashion for collecting and pinning has gone and and actually it's mostly frowned upon I mean you know we've got our got apps on our phone that we can take photos and identify things arguably we don't have to go out and kill things and put pins that's interesting so is that a bit taboo now in your world so if you go if you go to museums you'll find that most of the collections stop around the 1980s something like that something you did like as a as a community of scientists just sort of organically decide this isn't we don't need to do this anymore so I so I think in many cases there was no need to do it because you can identify things without catching them and killing them and I think also the fashion has changed in terms of you know seeing a whole load of dead things pinned out you know it's a tray it's perhaps not the same as going out into the field and seeing them flying around but yes it's but it's a resource a historical record yes and of course those specimens have genetic information associated with them as well so now the techniques are possible to extract genetic information from this museum material by that sort of looking back into the past tells us a lot about biodiversity now I wanted to ask you quite a specific question Jane really on when I was a little boy my dad loved doing wildlife photography and he wanted to try and take photos of every butterfly in the UK and say I think it would probably be 1979 or 1980 I remember we went on holiday in Dorset and I would be walking behind him in these kind of you know these fields of hay and he would have his camera out that's how he wanted to pin and mount the butterfly was to get a photograph of it and I wonder what would I have seen then that I would not see now and what might I see that would not have been there in 1980 well we know that the ranges of butterflies and moths have changed hugely as a consequence of human caused climate change some species are heading northwards in the UK really fast so I guess which species have arrived and which ones have gone depends on where you are but but where I am in in Yorkshire over the loose 40 years from the sort of 1980s been quite a lot of species turning up from further further south so things like gatekeepers and speckled woods so these are residential species they're not migrants moving at quite a quite a rate they're roughly speaking they're moving at about two kilometres a year as they're tracking the isotherms as they're moving moving northwards which is means they're not keeping track of the climate but something like a comma is it's going about 11 kilometres a year something like something like that so you're getting all of these southerly ones moving north as it warms up and then you have some butterflies just a few in the UK that like it cold you get them in Scotland on mountains and they're moving up the mountains and disappearing off the tops that brings us very nicely on to migration what one of the most remarkable abilities of butterflies and moths I suppose the question is that the distances they will migrate you mentioned the monarch butterfly earlier it's an astonishing migration so the monarchs are extraordinary they go all the way from Canada down south to spend the winter in Mexico so the same butterfly will fly all the way from Canada down to Mexico to exactly the same woodland where its predecessors spent the winter after spending a period of cold and actually you can replicate this by cooling the butterflies down in the lab they then completely switch their desire and in the spring when they wake up they want to fly north but actually there's several generations before they get back to Canada so it might be five or six generations so they lay eggs on milkweed and then the new butterflies come out and then they fly a bit further north they lay eggs so actually if you think about that whole migration back down to the same bit of woodland it's not the same butterfly doing that it's encoded in their DNA somehow that they can know exactly where to go back it's the same valley isn't it in Mexico and then the same woodland in Canada but multiple generations it's even more astonishing to me I can only assume they've left each other little pamphlets like Hansel and Gretel they left well yeah it's kind of like a culture or is it understood that how it's encoded we have no idea I mean that's just extraordinary we know a bit about how they find their for their direction well the navigation the navigation so they they do have a magnetic compass so they can use a magnetic north south but the most important signal is what's called a time-corrected sun compass so essentially you know what direction the sun is in and you know what time of day it is you can tell which directions north and south and they can tell which direction the sun is in even when it's cloudy because they can detect the polarization of light so they can know which where the sun is and they detect the the time of day using a circadian clock a bit like we do you know we have a sort of inbuilt clock and of course you have to entrain your clock on daylight hours obviously why you get jet lag when your clock is sort of out of sync and we we entrain our clock very sensibly it seems by molecules in our eyes which detect the light strangely these monarch butterflies use their antennae even though they have eyes they actually have light detectors in our antennae that is what they use to entrain their day-night cycle and if you cover the antennae with little bits of tinfoil well it's an obvious experiment do they start believing conspiracy theories so I can understand how you know you can navigate north south and magnetic bit the time-corrected compass and so but the specific location yeah no it's extraordinary a particular valley but but that's probably a particular to do with the monarch there's and I'd like to stress that there are many moths that are doing this type of migration and and they're doing it at night at very high altitudes which is even more impressive I'm going to I'm going to argue doing everything a butterfly does but backwards and in heels yeah yeah exactly but don't necessarily have to end up at exactly the same location to overwinter so this idea that it has to be incredibly precise in order for the migrants to persist is perhaps most true in monarch but not true in other another species I just want to ask you because we haven't talked about the moths so much but you said that they navigate as well so they're not using the sun because they're flying at night so so they're using star compass and the moon but the same principles apply about being able to work out where you are and the direction you're moving in I mean that's a remarkable thought for it for something a moth you know can you imagine how it feels Katie when it bashes into your kitchen window yes I do it all the time because it presumably thinks it's got to the moon yes and it wasn't expecting that he sees you with your scissors going 11 year old again that question though we should ask it because it gets asked an awful lot doesn't it why the moths the moth and the flame what why do the moths go to the light so they're using the moon and the stars to navigate by and that then means that when we put artificial light out it confuses them and they get attracted to lights in you know at night in people's kitchens and street lamps and so on and very often they get eaten at that point because bats or whatever will hang out around street lamps and eat them unfortunately we've run out we've just about run out of time so we have to go back to say well because obviously the overwhelming sense was that the butterflies won I'm now going to claim the moths because the moths are astronomers clearly a higher level a higher level of being so can we do you feel that because we've not really in any way talked about butterflies versus moths we've really found out that the butterflies are moths and that they are remarkable yes that we kind of have yet again ruined the conceit of a show that started off on such can we agree that they're both magnificent things what do you think you are the arbitrator are it moths or are it butterflies well here or is it moth or is it I started off very much on the side of butterflies with my tattoo but I've sat and I've listened to all of this and I have decided that butterflies are moths anyway and that moths do astronomy is quite remarkable so I as the adjudicator I'm going to come down on the side of moths thank you he asked our audience a question if you were going to emerge from a cocoon what would you like to emerge as I've got here Brian's essence at the end of this could I leave first whatever bug secretes the silky material they make Brian's hair from right I'm actually off now I've got a bee as stings can only get better and I've got a cheese because things can only get feta so there we are I love the idea that you can go you can come back as anything yeah feta cheese yeah thank you to our panel professor Jane Hill professor Chris Jiggins and Katie Brand now if if you would like to set up a match between two species then send in your suggestions I did actually suggest that we do a show where we do an illegal cox fight where we go to the back of an East End pub possibly the grey mare and Brian Cox fights Brian Cox but that wasn't allowed for health and safety so we're going to have an illegal dock fight instead in which a bare-chested Robert Winston takes on Dr Pimple Popper so come on spotty I'm going to get you anyway thank you very much everyone we'll see you next time bye-bye turn that nice again hello I'm Elvin Bragg and just before you go I wanted to let you know about another podcast from the BBC that I think you might like it's called In Our Time and each week three expert academics join me to discuss ideas from culture science history philosophy religion at the end of each podcast there's more discussion we couldn't fit into the live program so if you're curious about the world around you or you simply want to win your next general knowledge quiz subscribe to In Our Time on BBC Sounds car insurance is way too expensive that's why Hugo lets you break up your insurance bill so you can pay for it a little bit at a time start small buy just seven days of coverage then pay daily or weekly to stay insured cancel any time without talking to anyone Hugo is car insurance that fits your life and keeps more money in your pocket see why thousands of drivers rate Hugo 4.8 out of five stars give it a try and cancel any time no termination fees with hugo.com Thank you for listening to In Our Time on We'll see you next time.

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