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

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1:38BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and welcome to the infinite Lepidopteraneum. Or at the very least, the very, very, very big butterfly house. Lepidopteraneum. 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.

2:14Lepidopterium. Lepidopterarium. Lepidopterarium. Let's go to our guests who have not yet been introduced so we'll be in the phantasms. Lepidoctotarium, Lepidoctotarium 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 fatally 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.

3:05And 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? Wow. 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? Which are better? Moths are better, which are? They're plural.

3:46Well, I'll tell you what, why don't we change the subject then? and we say, now on Radio 4, we ask the question, which is better, is or are? Presented by Stephen Fry.

4:01Anyway, 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 lepidoctorist, 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 evolve to look similar to fool their predators.

4:44So 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 involved 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.

5:32So 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 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.

6:12I'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?

6:52And 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. 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?

7:35Well, I'll tell you what. 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? Moth. Someone's for the cow over there. And now for the butterfly. Well, I think it's currently the cow moth. So I reckon, would the audience agree that currently the butterfly is in the lead? 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.

8:25And 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. 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 that butterflies are just moths. So just accept that throughout, everyone's a winner today. Just welcome to the world of light entertainment. 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.

9:13The 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.

9:56We'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 Rothamsted, which is in St.

10:40Holborn'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.

11:21So moths are fabulous. But that Mrs. Shipton is one, Old Mother Shipton is fascinating because I understand 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? 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 can't see the two eyes so at no point would that have been any use whatsoever really well I think there is something that these eye spots come up again and again in in butterflies and uh i think there's something quite striking about just suddenly seeing this eye when a peacock butterfly for example has its eyes on the 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 you don't really see them together like that but maybe it's still a bit of shocking to a predator to see that big flashing eyes yeah but chris so you your your job You have a minute or so to make the case for butterflies.

12:46So 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.

13:19So 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 color 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.

13:52I 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 lepidophthora that's nested within the bigger lepidophthora that we call butterflies. To an expert, what is the difference?

14:28How do you decide? If you see a specimen you've never seen before, for example... 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 scientific.

15:01It 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.

15:46And, 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. 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.

16:26Okay. So at the current stage, where do you sit in terms of butterflies versus moths taking 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. 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 moth when I was about 11. They were dead already, can I just say. 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 so I never found a dead butterfly.

17:17I'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 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 Brian's twitching a lot now Yes, I get it, I get it But I think these things are important in terms of our emotional engagement with moths and butterflies So I'm a bit attracted by that side of the mothness So we've got all to play for, is what I'm saying I do have a question about butterflies and moths.

17:57It'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 heard on this radio thing before you leap in with all the expert analysis 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 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.

19:02And 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.

19:46So 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 realize this either i don't think katie which is we'd kind of been taught that he'd become entirely liquefied and what you're actually saying is that whatever we want to call the consciousness, the nerve endings, whatever, 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.

20:35That's right, yes. That's right, yeah. Well, thanks for dashing that mystery. Explaining it. Explaining it. No, thank you for that. I've been interested in that for a while. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

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23:26from an evolutionary perspective butterflies and mutter 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 how old are the lepidoptera so i would say about 300 million 300 million years ago. Butterflies originated 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.

24:02And 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 I 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. 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.

24:39They get those molecules, they can either make them themselves or they get them from the plants 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 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 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 the adults are also laying the eggs that produce the caterpillars so they They have, you know...

26:06It'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 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 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.

26:58That's the thing about nature, isn't it, where you hear all these and watch all these things 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. Sorry, 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? That's sometimes true, yes.

27:33It'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. 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.