The moth that defies stereotypes with bright colours and day activity
The West Sussex Gazette has teamed up with the Sussex Wildlife Trust to bring you questions and answers about all things nature. Charlotte Owen, WildCall officer at Sussex Wildlife Trust, is on hand to answer your wildlife and conservation queries. As well as answering a variety of wildlife queries, Charlotte is always eager to receive your wildlife sightings in Sussex.
WildCall provides fact sheets ranging from how to make bird cake to beachcombing and can offer advice on environmental and planning issues as well as the best ways to help wildlife such as frogs, birds, bats and bees flourish in your garden.
To talk to Charlotte, call 01273 494777 between 9.30am and 1pm on weekdays, email wildcall@sussexwt.org.uk, write to her at WildCall, Sussex Wildlife Trust, Woods Mill, Henfield,
BN5 9SD, or visit sussexwildlifetrust. org.uk/wildcall
Can you identify this butterfly? Or is it a moth?
This is a burnet moth, smashing moth stereotypes with its bright colours and daytime activity.
This one is a six-spot burnet, named after the number of red spots on each forewing. There’s also a five-spot burnet and a few other species, each being a variation on the black and red theme.
The red spots indicate to predators that they are poisonous: they can release hydrogen cyanide when attacked, which tastes terrible and can kill in large enough doses.
Burnet moths can be found in flowery grassland and are particularly fond of knapweed and thistles. The black-andyellow caterpillars feed on bird’s-foot trefoil and will hibernate over winter until next spring, when they will pupate in papery cocoons attached to grass stems ready to emerge into summer-flying adults.
It isn’t very often that you can say that you’ve shared an experience with billions of other people but that is exactly what happened last week. There was genuine panic among users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp when the sister platforms simultaneously crashed for six hours after routine IT maintenance went wrong. My first thought on hearing the news was ‘I wouldn’t want to be the person who flicked that switch’ but it wasn’t long before I started to worry about where I would get my daily dose of nonsense.
This was big news. So big it led the news bulletins that night with reporters assigned the task of finding people who had been affected by the problem. Not that they had to look very far – the latest statistics show that more than 48 million people in the UK have a Facebook account and literally everybody with a pulse uses WhatsApp these days.
Some of the bewildered-looking types who were interviewed talked about the inconvenience of not being able to connect with the outside world for a quarter of a day. One indignant woman complained bitterly about how she had to resort to text messaging for the evening. It wasn’t that long ago that the text was regarded as a new kind of witchcraft, now it is bracketed alongside the humble letter.
Can we really not do without Facebook and finding out why a fella you briefly worked with 15 years ago has the hump, or Instagram, and its endless sea of heavily filtered pictures posted by people who obviously don’t enjoy their lives as much as they crack on? In a world where millions of us have unlimited phone calls and text messages as part of our mobile phone contracts, I have never fully understood why WhatsApp is so essential to so many unless receiving scores of unsolicited ‘jokes’ and memes is considered essential these days.
The outage was such big news