Climate change has caused Britain's butterflies to get bigger - Natural History Museum
In response to a warming world, many species are physically changing their body sizes.
While for some this means getting smaller to cope with extreme temperatures, for insects the response is more varied.
New research using computer vision to analyse tens of thousands of butterfly specimens has found that some British butterflies are steadily getting bigger in response to climate change.
Butterflies across the British countryside have been steadily increasing in size over the past few decades.
As the average temperature of the planet has increased as a result of the climate crisis, it has caused butterflies with late-stage larvae to grow bigger.
The research, carried out by a team of scientists from the Museum, the University of Southampton and the University of California, has used a computer vision pipeline which allows the rapid analysis of thousands of specimens, vastly increasing the sample size for projects such as this.
Dr Phillip B Fenberg, from the University of Southampton and co-author of the paper, says, 'Our paper is among the first to show that computer vision can be applied to these digital images for testing hypotheses on how animals may respond to climate change.
'This is accelerating our potential to understand how the biosphere will react to climate change.'
The study, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution also managed to confirm that females are the larger sex for most species of British butterflies. While this had long been generally assumed, this is the largest study to have actually tested it.
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Posted On: 05/04/2022