White butterflies are filling Johannesburg’s skies earlier than usual. Climate change is to blame

We don’t know for sure when the next group will come through Gauteng. But phenologists will be watching carefully, using data about timing and temperature to assess threats to the butterflies and the ecosystems they inhabit.

published earlier this year, my students and I used media reports to quantify how the timing of the annual butterfly migration had changed over nearly 100 years.

These print and social media records are a gold mine for phenologists. For our research we recorded the date of newspaper articles and social media posts relating to sightings of these butterflies in Joburg and used this to quantify changes in the timing. We managed to compile a total of 120 records of the brown-veined white butterflies in Joburg. From these, we found that the arrival dates have advanced by 2.9 days per decade over the past century, from approximately mid-January to mid-December. Their November arrival this year is earlier than any of the dates in our record. However, because we must rely on print and social media reporting, it is very possible that it is not the earliest that they have ever arrived.

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