A butterfly found to have flown 1,700 kilometers from Japan’s Kochi Prefecture to Taiwan’s offshore island of Lanyu, or Orchid Island, has surprised both Taiwanese and Japanese researchers.
During a research trip on Lanyu, home of the aboriginal Tao people, a research team led by Chen Chien-chih, director of Taipei Municipal University of Education’s Graduate School of Environmental Education and Resources, Nov. 20 caught a chestnut tiger, Parantica sita niponica, which had been marked by scientists in Japan.
“The probability of making such a finding is one in 100,000,” Chen said. “The chestnut tiger we caught has the date Oct. 11 marked on its wing, which tells us it took 40 days for the little insect to fly all the way southward.”
“The catch provided us with more information on the movement of the butterfly,” Chen said.
The professor said in a telephone interview that this is the ninth butterfly his team has found to travel from Japan to Taiwan since 2001, with four of them caught on Orchid Island.
The dispersal of the chestnut tiger also amazed Koji Sakurai, a Japanese butterfly expert who joined Chen’s field trip to Orchid Island.
“Unbelievable, almost like a dream,” Sakurai exclaimed. The marked butterfly was caught together with almost 80 other chestnut tigers, and researchers presume they all made the same trip.
Chen said Taiwan’s chestnut tigers normally fly northeastward to Japan in June each year riding southwestern air currents, and their Japanese counterparts start to make the reverse trip to Taiwan in mid-October with the northeastern monsoon.
Meanwhile, under the orchestration of Chen and Lanyu Township chief Shyaman Mamrat, Orchid Island residents started to join the butterfly catch and mark routines this year.
“By means of this research activity, we hope for the butterfly to become an attraction for Japanese tourists during wintertime, and help develop ecotourism on Orchid Island,” Shyaman Mamrat said. (THN)