Tipperary Biodiversity

We have an exciting new venture that we hope will attract a lot of public use. To help you enjoy and understand the wealth of biodiversity around us, a website has been set up that will help us all to recognise and appreciate the species we encounter. Over time the natural biodiversity of our landscape is changing, and we want to keep track of what is happening. We would like to receive pictures and news of what you have seen, where and when you saw it, what it was doing, what it was feeding on, and so on.



If you go to our website (www.cabraghwetlands.ie) you will find a link to Tipperary Biodiversity. Alternatively try tipperarybiodiversity.blogspot.com/. There you will be invited to download your pictures of animals, plants, insects and birds, and if you have no picture, then leave a comment about what you have seen or want to find out. This is a great way to get help from other users to identify what you cannot recognize, or ask questions on the blog which someone out there in the cyberworld will surely be able to answer.



It is early days, but the site already contains more information and pictures on the marsh fritillary butterfly which we wrote about two weeks ago. There is a request to identify an unusual spider that someone found on the wall of their house, and an answer. A hairy white caterpillar has been photographed, posted on the blog and identified as a Pale Tussock moth larva (there’s a new one to most of us).



Most interesting of all, a Vapourer moth has been pictured. The comments tell us that it has to be a male, because the female is wingless. Our writer tells us that he found a colourful and distinctive Vapourer caterpillar feeding on willow late in September, took it home to show the children, and then, when going to release it, found that it had begun the next stage of its lifecycle – the cocoon phase. Leaving it where it was, he awaited its hatching. This Sunday (10/10), a wingless adult female Vapourer emerged.



She can scarely move, swollen with eggs and waiting for a male to fertilize her. She appears to have no function other than to produce eggs and propagate the species, and as she has no wings, she hardly has an independent life. Using the scent of pheromones, she can attract males, so smell can be seen as a language, a means of communication. After her eggs are laid, she will die. The eggs will overwinter before hatching in batches from March onwards. As the female cannot fly or move more than a few centimetres, the dispersal of the species and the joining of different clusters to ensure genetic diversity are entirely dependent on how far the caterpillar can walk from the pupating site. Not surprisingly it is very localised and relies on its habitat suffering no sudden changes of the type that man in his wisdom is wont to cause. Birds and other predators will give wingless moths and fragile caterpillars a hard enough struggle to survive without human damage to their habitat.



Use the new blog to post pictures, ask and answer questions, add comments and advice, and give extraordinary creatures like the Vapourer moth a little more chance to survive.