S2E8: Aural Butterflies

In this this episode Hannah Hunter unpacks some cool detail about butterflies sonic communication. This season is all about “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast.

 Featured: 

• Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy on The Animal Turn.
• Sound Production and Hearing the Blue Cracker Butterfly  by Jayne Yack et al.
• Bat Communication with Gloriana Chaverri on The Animal Turn.
• The Sound of Millions of Monarch Butterflies by Phil Torres and the Jungle Diaries

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Hannah Hunter, co-host
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• Thank you to the sponsors of the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast, “Animals and Sound,” where this animal highlight was originally aired 10 March 2022. 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

The Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:30 Cracker Butterflies
• 4:50 Clicking Peacock Butterflies
• 6:50 Credits
• 7:50 Beyond Human Ranges

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 2 of The Animal Highlight. 
• This season is focused on “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast (Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy).
• This season I am joined with a co-host, Hannah Hunter. A PhD Candidate in Geography at Queen’s University and a member of the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory.
• This episode looks at butterflies and their sonic communication. There is a lot we don’t know about butterfly communication but we do know that they are visually and chemically keen, they mostly communicate through pheromones and visual cues. 

01:30 – Cracker Butterflies

• Some butterflies do, however, communicate through sound. For instance, the hamadryas butterfly who are commonly found throughout South America and all the way up to Arizona. They are commonly known as the cracker butterfly because males make a sound with their wings that sounds like cracking. A study by Jane Yack from Carlton University in 2000 is the most comprehensive study that exists about this sonic behaviour. The butterflies were found to make this sound both within and beyond their species boundaries. The exact reasons for this behaviour are unclear. It is thought to be territorial or for courtship practices. It seems they partly use these sounds to figure out the sex of the other butterflies. 
• If butterflies are making sound for communication does that mean they are able to hear? Before Jayne Yack’s study this question had not been explored in great detail, people weren’t even sure if butterflies had ears. The proposal is that butterflies hear through a membrane on their wings called a vogel organ which functions as their ‘ears’. This is consistent with how other insects hear. Sounds vibrate this membrane and this is sensed by other organs. 

04:50 – Clicking Peacock Butterflies

• Peacock Butterflies produce intense, ultrasonic clicks that startle bats that might prey on them. Foreshadowing for the episode on The Animal Turn about Bat Communication. Peacock butterflies are called this because they have spots on their wings that resemble the oval eye-like patterns on a peacock. Usually peacock butterflies are thought to ward off larger predators like birds through eye-spot displays. They eye-spots look a lot like the eyes of an owl. With bats, bats are more scared off by the sounds that these peacock butterflies make than by their visual displays. These are ultrasonic sounds. 

06:27 – Cascading Monarch Butterflies

• During migration tens of millions of monarchs can be found hibernating in forests in Mexico. Video by explorer Phil Torres records the sounds of these millions of monarch butterflies and he refers to the sounds they make as “some of the rarest sounds on Earth.”
• The butterflies hang in clusters in formations that look like beehives or fuzz on the trees. When the sun comes up the butterflies wake up and come off the trees. Because there are millions of them it is sort of this amazing cascading sound that sounds like a waterfall. 

07:50 – Beyond Human Ranges

• We admire butterflies for how thy look but sometimes we don’t think about their sounds, also because they are outside of our range of hearing. 
• Completely unrelated, a friend told Claudia that humans have stripes. It turns out cats can see humans’ stripes.
• Studying animals shows how we all experience the world in such different ways. 

06:50 - Credits

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast.
• Thank you also to the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory who were sponsors for the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast that was focused on “Animals and Sound” where these animal highlights were extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Hannah Hunter for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• Co-hosted by Claudia Hirtenfelder and Hannah Hunter. 
• This episode was produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder