ARCTIC BUTTERFLIES 



By Austin H. Clark 

 Curator, Division of Echinoderms, United States National Museum 



[With 7 plates] 

 THE FAR NORTH AS A HOME FOR BUTTERFLIES 



No temperatures that are found in nature are too low for butter- 

 flies — that is, for certain kinds of butterflies. We look on butterflies 

 as harbingers of spring and as nature's dainty ornaments of our fields 

 and gardens in the sultry days of summer. Yet some of them in their 

 early stages can withstand the severest cold of an arctic winter, or 

 the still severer cold at Verkhoyansk in northeastern Siberia, where 

 the mean temperature in January is 60° below zero, and on some days 

 it gets much colder. 



Covered with ice and snow and all but inaccessible is the grim 

 Arctic waste of Grinnell Land, just across the narrow Kennedy 

 Channel from northwestern Greenland. Here at Lady Franklin Bay 

 the average winter temperature is 36° below with a minimum of 73° 

 in March, and the average summer temperature is only 34° above. 

 Almost identical temperatures are found at Floeberg Beach, on the 

 northern coast of Grant Land (lat, 82°27' N.), facing the Polar Sea 

 with its paleocrystic ice — permanent ice of unknown age. 



Desolate and forbidding as this ice-bound region is, it is far from 

 being as barren as it looks, for plants are to be found wherever there is 

 soil enough and sufficient warmth from the rays of the Arctic summer 

 sun to nourish them and to permit their growth. Indeed, in this 

 region of perpetual ice and snow where the winter temperatures are 

 mostly below the freezing point of mercury there is a surprising 

 wealth of plants, many of them with conspicuous and very pretty 

 flowers. No less then 75 different kinds of vascular plants have beei 

 collected there. 



This sounds almost incredible. Still more incredible seems the 

 fact that from this grim region of eternal ice the British ships Dis- 

 covery and Alert brought home no less than 35 gaily colored butter- 

 flies belonging to five different species, and two kinds of brightly 

 colored bumblebees. 



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