THIS may look like the folds of a snake but don’t be fooled — it is actually an extreme close-up of a monarch butterfly wing.
To capture the entire wing, California-based photographer Chris Perani took 2100 separate exposures, each just 3 micrometres apart, and then stitched them together. The hefty magnification is achieved using a microscope attached to a telephoto camera lens. The set-up is so sensitive that a speck of dust or someone walking in the studio could ruin the photo.
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These colourful scales are just 0.1 millimetres across. Yet despite their small size, they help the monarch butterfly boost its flight efficiency. The monarch has one of the longest migrations on the planet, with some butterflies flying almost 5000 kilometres along the eastern seaboard from Canada to their Mexican home for the winter. Others travel down the Californian coast, huddling together in the branches of trees like eucalyptus in southern parts of the state to keep warm.
The sight of monarchs fluttering en masse above the Californian cliffs each autumn may soon vanish, however. Counts of monarchs by volunteers at known Californian overwintering sites in November 2018 hit an all-time low of 28,500 butterflies – a far cry from the 1.2 million when the annual count began in 1997.
More worryingly, this is below the 30,000 threshold estimated to lead the western monarch population to collapse. Habitat loss is one possible culprit for the decline, with the native milkweed plant on which the monarchs lay their eggs hit particularly hard.
Photographer
Chris Perani,
