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

Introduction

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Host Introduction

1:54Hello, 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.

2:13Lepidocteraneum. 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.

2:33Lepidocteraneum. 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.

Moths vs Butterflies

2:51Now, 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

3:21when Brian rings his little bell. And he does like to ring his little bell.

3:28Kind 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?

4:00It 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.

4:19Anyway, 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

4:50at 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

5:22both 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

5:53and 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

6:24of 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.

6:55And 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?

7:11And I said, yes.

7:14That'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.

7:26As 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.

7:43Can I just say, I really love the way they turned on all the electric lights for the moths to put their hands on.

7:51Robin 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!

8:08Someone's for the cow over there. And now for the butterfly. Moo!

8:16Well, I think it's currently the cow moth.

8:20So 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.

Case for Moths

8:33It'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.

9:06Because 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,

9:37but 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

10:07what 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

10:39and 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.

11:10So 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.

11:41But 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.

12:12They 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

12:43when 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.

Case for Butterflies

12:59But 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

13:31and 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

14:02that 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.

14:32So 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,

15:02as 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

15:34except for when they don't.

15:37And 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.

16:10You 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,

16:41you 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.

16:55Well, 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.

17:27So 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.

17:59I 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?

18:29Well, 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,

19:01whatever 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,

19:32and 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

20:03the 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

20:33that 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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Evolutionary History

24:01From an evolutionary perspective, butterflies and moth are insects. 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.

24:31I 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

25:02these 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,

25:32you 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.

26:03Work 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

26:34but 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.

27:05So 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

27:36and 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?

28:07That'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

28:37the 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

29:08how 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.

29:38I 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

30:08itself, 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