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  3. Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Sc

Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Sc

游客2024-03-07  55
问题     Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Scotland for the first time in 133 years. Conservationists wondered if the creature had established a breeding colony in the country—and a hew discovery suggests there is good reason to be optimistic. As Russell Jackson reports for the Scotsman, volunteer naturalists recently found a cluster of tiny white-letter hairstreak eggs on an elm tree in Lennel, a small village near the country of Berwickshire.
    Volunteers with the UK’s Butterfly Conservation have been carefully tracking white-letter hairstreak migrations for more than ten years. The butterfly, which boasts a distinctive "W" pattern on the underside of its wings, is native to the U.K. and was once widespread in England and Wales. But white-letter hairstreak numbers have declined drastically in recent decades,
    largely due to an outbreak of Dutch elm disease, an illness that took hold in the 1960s. The disease has killed millions of British elm trees, which is the food source for white-letter hairstreak caterpillars (蝴蝶或蛾的幼虫).
    Recently, there have been signs that the butterfly’s populations are recovering. The Butterfly Conservation team has observed the white-letter hairstreak gradually spreading northwards, possibly due to warming climates. But the white-letter hairstreak is still a very rare sight in Scotland, and the volunteers who found the cluster of eggs—Ken Haydock and Jill Mills—were thrilled by the discovery.
    "It was a lovely sunny morning and we were searching the elm trees by the River Tweed at Lennel when Jill called me over," Haydock says in a Butterfly Conservation statement. "I could see by the look on her face that she had found something. We were both smiling with disbelief and delight when we realized what Jill had found and within seconds I was fumbling in my pack for the camera—my hands were shaking!"
    That Haydock and Mills managed to spot the eggs is quite remarkable; according to Vittoria Traverso of Atlas Obscura, white-letter hairstreak eggs are smaller than a grain of salt. The volunteers were also excited to discover an old, hatched eggshell amid the cluster of new eggs. According to the Butterfly Conservation, this suggests that the white letter hairstreak could have been breeding in the area since at least 2016.
    Paul Kirkland, the director of the Butterfly Conservation’s Scotland chapter, says in the statement that conservationists will "need to have a few more years of confirmed sightings" before they can classify the white-letter hairstreak as a resident species of Scotland. "If this happens, it would take the total number of butterflies found in Scotland to 34," he says, "which really would be something to celebrate." [br] What does Paul Kirkland think would be something worth celebrating?
选项 A、Volunteers can find more eggs of the special butterfly in the future.
B、The total number of butterfly species found in the U.K. adds up to 34.
C、Conservationists will have more years of confirmed sightings.
D、The number of butterfly species found in Scotland increases again.
答案 D
解析 根据题干中的信息词Paul Kirkland，可以把答题线索定位到最后一段。最后一段引述了蝴蝶保护协会苏格兰分会的负责人保罗.柯克兰的话，他说：“如果这种情况真的发生，在苏格兰被发现的蝴蝶品种将达到34种，这的确将是一件值得庆祝的事。”由此可知，在保罗.柯克兰看来，苏格兰蝴蝶品种达到34种是一件值得庆祝的事，即在他看来，苏格兰蝴蝶品种数量的增加是一件值得庆祝的事，故本题应选D。B项错在in the U. K. ，此处说的是苏格兰，而不是整个英国，故排除。
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