Butterfly

They call it a Butterfly! It is a beautiful animal that flies and is of various colors. Has two pairs of membranous wings covered with scales and mouth parts adapted for sucking. Distinguished by the antennae of moths rectilinear ending a ball, by the habits of life during the day, by the metamorphosis that takes place within a chrysalis rigid abdomen and the thin and elongated. The butterfly has no specific place to be, always going from flower to flower, more specifically in fields long flowering. Sometimes even as we find in our backyard. They feed on nettle leaves, small caterpillars, nectar from flowers and pieces of fruit decomposing. It is estimated that around the world, there are about 24,000 species of butterflies and now there are only 435 species of butterflies. The butterfly is an important pollination. If extinct, there would be damage to the flora (initial damage) and fauna (consequential damages). And why have only sexual reproduction has the genetic variability of the animal.

The life cycle of butterflies includes the following steps:

1) egg → Pre-larval stage

2) Larva →also called caterpillar or caterpillar,

3) pupa →that develops within the pupa (or cocoon)

4) imago →adult

Important

The wings of butterflies are the most precious thing they have is with them flying to survive. A human being can never play with their hands in butterfly wing, as it is to destroy it, so it gets weaker and eventually die.

What is the ozone layer?

The oxygen in our atmosphere that we breathe is made up of 2 atoms of oxygen (O2), with ultraviolet rays from the sun, oxygen can be separated and they are free (O) to bind (O2) This leads to the Ozone (O2 + O) = (O3).

The ozone layer is the layer that protects us from ultraviolet rays coming from the sun These radiation cause skin cancers and damage the human immune system, people become more vulnerable to disease infecciosas.Calcula that a 1% decrease in thickness cause an increase of 3 to 6% in the onset of skin cancer.

Any change in the ozone layer can drastically modify the climate. The layer keeps the heat with his lower air cools completely changing global patterns of wind, all this is reflected in a change of climate which in turn will affect all life on planet Earth.



Degradation
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), in addition to other chemicals produced by humans that are quite stable and contain elements of chlorine or bromine, such as methyl bromide, are largely responsible for destroying the ozone layer. The CFC has many uses because they are relatively low toxicity, non-flammable and does not break (easily). Being so stable, lasting about one hundred and fifty years. These compounds, due to pollution caused by man, rise into the stratosphere completely unchanged because of its stability and the range of 10 to 50 km altitude, where the Sun's ultraviolet rays to reach, break down, releasing its radical in the case of CFCs, the chemical element chlorine. Once released, a single chlorine atom destroys about 100 000 ozone molecules before returning to the surface, many years later.

Three percent (3%), perhaps even five percent (5%) of the total ozone have been destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons. Other gases such as nitrogen oxide (NO) released by aircraft in the stratosphere, also contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer.

According to Quercus, Portugal is one of the European Union countries that contributed most to the destruction of the ozone layer: in 2004, Portugal regained about 0.5% of the existing CFC equipment end of life, such as refrigerators, freezers and air conditioning. The non-removal and treatment of CFCs still present in older equipment, releases to the atmosphere from 500 tons per year, according to Quercus. In 1986, there was the first time the progressive destruction of the ozone layer, with its consequent thinning, called the ozone hole. This discovery was made on the Antarctic by the British physicist Joe Farman.



The hole in the ozone layer
Despite the gases that damage the ozone layer are broadcast around the world - 90% in the northern hemisphere, mainly resulting from human activity - is that in Antarctica the failure of the ozone layer is bigger. The area of the ozone hole is defined as the size of the region which is ozone below 200 Dobson Units (DUs - unit of measurement that describes the thickness of the ozone in a column directly above where the measurements are made): 400 DUs is equivalent 4 mm thick. Before the spring in Antarctica, the normal reading is 275 DUs.

The hole in the ozone layer is a phenomenon that occurs only during a particular time of year, between August and early November (spring in the southern hemisphere). What we know as "hole in the ozone layer" is not exactly a hole in the layer of ozone gas, in fact it is a rarefaction (thinning thick), which is explained by the molecular arrangements of the behavior of gases in a natural environment that would enable a fault to be called hole. When the temperature rises in the Antarctic in mid-November, the region still has a level below what would be considered normal ozone. During the month, due to the gradual increase of temperature, the air surrounding the area where the hole starts a movement toward the center of the region of low gas. Thus, the displacement of air masses rich in ozone (outside the hole) provides the return to normal levels of ozone in the upper atmosphere thus closing the hole. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in its 2006 report, states that the reduction in the emission of CFCs as a result of the Montreal Protocol, will result in a gradual decrease of the ozone hole, with a full recovery in about 2065. However, this would be masked by annual variability due to temperature variability over Antarctica. When the weather systems of large scale, that form in the troposphere and the stratosphere after rising, are weaker, the stratosphere is colder than usual, which causes an increase in the hole in the ozone layer. When they are weaker (as in 2002), the hole decreases.