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rainforest news
A typical 5 square
mile area of Amazon rainforest supports:
1500
flowering plants.
750 species of tree.
450 species of bird.
500 species of butterfly.
Every second a slice of rainforest the size of a
football field is destroyed.
Every day 86400 football fields of rainforest are
destroyed.
31 million football fields of
rainforest are destroyed every year.
Over
10000 square miles of Amazonian
rainforest is burnt down annually to make way for cattle pastures. The
nutrient-poor
land can only support very low
densities of cattle. Every year in the dry season the pastures are
set alight to stimulate fresh grass growth and kill cattle
parasites. The fires
rage uncontrolled, spreading into further areas of forest.
Deforested areas are much hotter and drier than the rainforests.
Consequently the average temperature of the whole region rises and humidity falls dramatically. This causes
shrinkage of the remaining forest, altering the vegetation
structure and annihilating wildlife. Elsewhere in the tropics the
situation is equally bad. Vast areas of rainforest in Malaysia
and Indonesia has already been cut down and replaced with oil
palm plantations.
Please support rainforest conservation :
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boycott South American beef |
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reduce consumerism |
boycott oil palm and soya products |
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reduce your mileage |
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Acknowledgements
The data presented on this website
is
based on over 50 years of extensive personal observation of
butterflies by Adrian Hoskins, supplemented by data collated from
numerous books, scientific journals & academic papers; and
personal communication with biologists including Andrew Neild,
Bernard d'Abrera, Robert Robbins, Curtis Callaghan, Keith
Willmott, Blanca Huertas, Kevin Tuck, Jean-Marc Gayman, Torben
Larsen, Ronald Brabant, Jorge Bizzaro, Martin Warren, Delano
Lewis, Jason Hall, Bernard Hermíer, Gerardo Lamas, Maurizio
Bollino, Michael Parsons, Matthew Oates, Phil DeVries, Jeremy
Thomas, Pat Haynes, Szabolcs Safian, Martin Honey and Stéphane
Attal to whom I express my sincere gratitude.
I would
also like to thank Bernard & Lucilla d'Abrera for their
very generous donation of 11 vols of
Butterflies of the World, an
indispensable series of books illustrating specimens of
most of the currently known species of butterfly.
My thanks go also to Colin Baker
for his generous donation of software, and to Tony Hoare
who kindly donated Willmott's book
The Genus Adelpha.
Finally a big thank you to my friends Tony Hoare, Doris Ashby,
Peter Bruce-Jones, Colin Baker, Steve Meredith; and to my partner Emily Halsey
- see her
website
www.neotropicalmoths.com.
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