Garden varieties: how attractive are recommended garden plants to butterflies?

One way the public can engage in insect conservation is through wildlife gardening, including the growing of insect-friendly flowers as sources of nectar. However, plant varieties differ in the types of insects they attract. To determine which garden plants attracted which butterflies, we counted butterflies nectaring on 11 varieties of summer-flowering garden plants in a rural garden in East Sussex, UK. These plants were all from a list of 100 varieties considered attractive to British butterflies, and included the five varieties specifically listed by the UK charity Butterfly Conservation as best for summer nectar. A total of 2659 flower visits from 14 butterfly and one moth species were observed. We performed a principal components analysis which showed contrasting patterns between the species attracted to Origanum vulgare and Buddleia davidii. The “butterfly bush” Buddleia attracted many nymphalines, such as the peacock, Inachis io, but very few satyrines such as the gatekeeper, Pyronia tithonus, which mostly visited Origanum. Eupatorium cannibinum had the highest Simpson’s Diversity score of 0.75, while Buddleia and Origanum were lower, scoring 0.66 and 0.50 respectively. No one plant was good at attracting all observed butterfly species, as each attracted only a subset of the butterfly community. We conclude that to create a butterfly-friendly garden, a variety of plant species are required as nectar sources for butterflies. Furthermore, garden plant recommendations can probably benefit from being more precise as to the species of butterfly they attract

Revealing hidden species distribution with pheromones: the case of Synanthedon vespiformis (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae) in Sweden

Synanthedon vespiformis L. (Lepidoptera: Sesiidae) is considered a rare insect in Sweden, discovered in 1860, with only a few observations recorded until a sex pheromone attractant became available recently. This study details a national survey conducted using pheromones as a sampling method for this species. Through pheromone trapping we captured 439 specimens in Southern Sweden at 77 sites, almost tripling the number of previously reported records for this species. The results suggest that S. vespiformis is truly a rare species with a genuinely scattered distribution, but can be locally abundant. Habitat analyses were conducted in order to test the relationship between habitat quality and the number of individuals caught. In Sweden, S. vespiformis is thought to be associated with oak hosts, but our attempts to predict its occurrence by the abundance of oaks yielded no significant relationships. We therefore suggest that sampling bias and limited knowledge on distribution may have led to the assumption that this species is primarily reliant on oaks in the northern part of its range, whereas it may in fact be polyphagous, similar to S. vespiformis found as an agricultural pest in Central and Southern Europe. We conclude that pheromones can massively enhance sampling potential for this and other rare lepidopteran species. Large-scale pheromone-based surveys provide a snapshot of true presences and absences across a considerable part of a species national distribution range, and thus for the first time provide a viable means of systematically assessing changes in distribution over time with high spatiotemporal resolution

Colectomy in patients with acute colitis: a systematic review.

Contains fulltext : 81081.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)BACKGROUND: For patients with acute colitis, the decision when and how to operate is difficult in most cases. It was the aim of this systematic review to analyze early mortality and morbidity of colectomy for severe acute colitis in order to identify opportunities to improve perioperative treatment and outcome. METHODS: A systematic review of the available literature in the Medline and PubMed databases from 1975 to 2007 was performed. All articles were assessed methodologically; the articles of poor methodological quality were excluded. Articles on laparoscopic colectomy for acute colitis were analyzed separately. RESULTS: In total, 29 studies met the criteria for the systematic review, describing a total of 2,714 patients, 1,257 of whom were operated on in an acute setting, i.e., urgent or emergency colectomy. Reported in-hospital mortality was 8.0%; the 30-day mortality was 5.2%. Morbidity was 50.8%. The majority of complications were of infectious and thromboembolic nature. Over the last three decades, there was a shift in indications from toxic megacolon, from 71.1% in 1975-1984 to 21.6% in 1995-2005, to severe acute colitis not responding to conservative treatment, from 16.5% in 1975-1984 to 58.1% in 1995-2007. Mortality decreased from 10.0% to 1.8%. Morbidity remained high, exceeding 40% in the last decade. Mortality after laparoscopic surgery was 0.6%. Complication rate varies from 16-37%. CONCLUSION: Colectomy for acute colitis is complicated by considerable morbidity. The incidence of adverse outcome has substantially decreased over the last three decades, but further improvements are still required. The retrospective nature of the included studies allows for a considerable degree of selection bias that limits robust and clinically sound conclusions about both conventional and laparoscopic surgery