Hello - I'm drawing a little guy I found :) cute yes?
Long semi-informative passage ahead
So this is an apollo butterfly or mountain apollo. It's a rather pretty little butterfly, characterised by the red dotted pattern. It lives in mountain regions and sometime vineyards all over Europe, parts of Asia and Skandinavia. It was germany's butterfly of the year 2024!
And it's strongly endangered.
The reasons for it's drastically shrinking numbers aren't entirely clear, but it's very likely, that climate change plays a key role in it. A subspecies found at the moselle valley went almost extinct because of pesticides used for the vineyards in the 80s, but due to the united efforts of activists and lepidopterologists (lol butterfly scientists) the usage of pesticides was banned and the butterfly saved.
Since 2012 it's numbers are dwindling radically again and noone really knows why, but climate change likely is at great fault. This isn't something as easily fixable as controlling aggricultural toxine use, but something that can be dealt with to an extend, if everyone does their part to stop it.
The Burning Maze is real. And it's not a magic sun god essence induced fantasy place, it's a very real, human made issue and this butterfly is dying because of it. It's happening right now, everywhere and we can only hope to stop it, if we all work together. Wear second hand, use public transport, kill convince your local mega industry CEO of blasting less factory waste into the environment - just do whatever little thing you can to contribute, so hopefully we can all band together and safe this butterfly, as well as all the other endangered species and our damm planet, just like that group of activists has already done before.
So this has been perhaps unnecessarily long and preachy for a silly fanart drawing featuring an endangered species. I honestly just really wanted to share this cool butterfly and perhaps something of it speaks to you in a way.
