‘Raising’ butterflies
Monarch butterflies
WARWICK, R.I.
Neck surgery in 2005 put Amy Ottilige’s life on hold. She was “bored,” until she noticed a monarch butterfly fluttering outside her window. The simple observation changed her life. Instead of just briefly stopping to smell the flowers, she came to appreciate the bugs’ life on them.
Once recovered and after some self-education, Ottilige embraced the importance of native plants and the pollinators they support. Since 2014, when she began “raising” butterflies, some 1,500 of the nectar-feeding insects have completed their metamorphosis in her yard, including 161 monarchs last year and 28 swallowtails this year.
“I just started, and then I ended up having a whole width of my house as a pollinator garden,” Ottilige said. “I’ve raised all types of butterflies, but monarchs are my favorite.”
Todd McLeish: The decline of other N.E. pollinators
Rusty patched bumblebees, listed on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species List, once occupied grasslands and tallgrass prairies of the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but most of these habitats have been lost or degraded.
— U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Most of the many news reports about the decline of bees and other pollinators focus on only one side of the story: the drop in honeybee numbers because of colony collapse disorder and its impact on food crops. Yet, as important as that issue is to human food security, it only affects one pollinator species, the European honeybee, a non-native species that is managed by commercial beekeepers.
The decline of native pollinators, of which there are thousands of species in North America that affect thousands of additional species of plants and animals, is largely ignored. Robert Gegear is trying to change that.
The assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth has launched a citizen science program called the Beecology Project to learn more about the ecology of native pollinators, starting with bumblebees, to better understand why some species are doing so poorly while others remain common.
“The survival of native pollinators has a positive cascading effect on so many other species, both the wild plants they pollinate and the other wildlife using those plants for food, shelter, and nest sites,” Gegear said. “Collectively, those relationships are increasing ecosystem health. But as we start to remove pollinators, we start to affect all these other species.
“Certain pollinators are heading toward extinction, but an equal or greater number have not been affected and are increasing. In ecology, it’s about diversity — not how many individuals you see but how many species you see, since each species has a connection with a flowering plant that has a connection to other species.”
For example, Gegear noted that Bombus impatiens, the common eastern bumblebee, is abundant, expanding, and easy to attract to flower gardens, but many other bumblebee species that used to be common are declining rapidly. Why that is happening is unknown.
“It could be that whatever we’re doing to the environment to drive declines in many species of bumblebees is having a direct positive impact on Bombus impatiens,” he said. “We use a lot of non-native plants in our gardens, and Bombus impatiens loves non-native plants, but other bumblebees don’t like non-natives. That’s one possibility. Or impatiens could be more flexible in its use of nest site habitat. We may be removing habitat that supports species that are less flexible in their nesting requirements. We have evidence for both explanations.”
Among the species formerly common in southern New England and are now quite rare are the yellow-banded bumblebee, the yellow bumblebee, the half-black bumblebee and the rusty patched bumblebee. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recently added the rusty patched bumblebee to the Endangered Species List.
The populations of some of these rare species declined especially fast. When Gegear was conducting his doctoral research in the late 1990s, the yellow-banded bumblebee was so abundant that he considered it a pest. Five years later, however, and he couldn’t find it for miles around his research sites.
“The problem is that we don’t know enough about the natural history of most of these species,” he said. “We know virtually nothing about their nesting preferences, about their overwintering preferences, their floral preferences. They have those preferences for a reason, but if you look at plant lists for bumblebees, everything is equal for all species, and that’s not the case.”
Since little is known about which flowers the rare species prefer, many of the growing number of pollinator gardens being installed around the region aren’t benefitting the species most in need. Instead, they’re just helping the species that are already common.
“People want to help, and they have good intentions, but the science isn’t there to tell them what they should be planting,” Gegear said. “I’m trying to fill in those gaps and change the focus of pollinator research by taking more of an ecological approach.”
To do so, he needs large amounts of data. To collect that data, he has turned to the general public. He teamed with computer scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to develop a web-based app to enable anyone to take photos and videos of bumblebees they see, identify them to species, identify the flowers they are visiting, and submit to Gegear’s database.
Based on the data he has already received, new populations of the rare bumblebee species have been found that will enable him to establish new research sites to learn more about those species. Many participants in the program are even planting gardens with the flowers those rare species prefer to boost those bumblebee populations.
Female monarch butterfly.
From ecoRI News
It’s not just bumblebee preferences that are little known. The same is true of the floral preferences of other pollinators. Gegear plans to expand his app to include observations of butterflies and other types of bees. Eventually, he hopes to expand it further so it can be used to conserve pollinators across the country.
“I put a plant on my property last year that we learned one species prefers, and as soon as it came into bloom, the threatened species came in,” he said. “So this approach really does work.”
Gegear is seeking to recruit more Beecology Project volunteers from throughout the region.
“And if you don’t want to use the app, just take a 10-second video of any bumblebee you see and send it to me,” he said. “That’s just as good.”
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
Todd McLeish: In R.I. monarchs resurging, other butterflies not
"Monarch Butterfly {No. 16} (watercolor,) by Titian Ramsay Peale, 1817, in the show "Flora/Fauna: The Naturalist Impulse in American Art,'' at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Conn.
Via ecoRI.org
Monarch butterflies have continued their resurgence in Rhode Island this year after a global decline in 2013, but overall populations of butterflies in the state appear to be declining slightly.
“The biggest factor this year was probably the long, wet spring we had,” said Marty Wencek, a biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and an avid butterfly observer for 55 years. “The wet weather can suppress the population when you have a lot of butterflies wintering as pupa and a lot of small caterpillars. Just like the gypsy moths got whacked by the wet weather, it can also affect other species.”
As if to emphasize the point, the first day of a two-day, statewide butterfly survey sponsored by the Audubon Society of Rhode Island was nearly rained out this year, resulting in fewer surveyors spending fewer hours searching for and counting fewer butterflies.
According to Jon Scoones, who coordinated the survey, 1,454 butterflies of 52 species were identified — a similar number of species but half of the individual totals of past years. Yet, there were still several notable highlights. Numbers of the tiny dun skipper, for instance, doubled compared to last year, while the even tinier sachem went from one in 2016 to 105 this year, almost all in Newport County.
Monarchs, which Scoones said “everyone uses as a litmus test,” increased from 29 to 134, mostly in the West Bay area of Narragansett Bay. Butterfly enthusiasts around the state have posted numerous photos on social media of monarch eggs, caterpillars and adults in recent weeks, many with messages claiming to feel a sense of relief that the butterflies appear to have rebounded.
On the other hand, survey results found the very common cabbage white to have declined from 638 to 243, and the popular pearl crescent dropped from 374 individuals to 78.
Of particular note, Scoones said, is that the number of variegated fritillaries, a southern species found fairly rarely in the state, increased this year, especially in the Big River area.
“I was heartened to see that the variegated fritillaries are coming up here, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or bad,” he said. “It’s nice to know that we’re having more butterflies in our area, but should it even be up here? I’m not sure. It might be here because of climate change.”
That may be the reason for increased sightings of other southern species as well, including zabulon skipper and red-banded hairstreak.
“They don’t really belong here, but everything from the south is trending in our direction,” Wencek said. “Why? Because it’s warmer.”
Some southern species aren’t accustomed to the winter cold of southern New England, however, and they become scarce following severe winters, like occurred in 2013. But others appear able to survive.
“A lot of factors affect butterflies,” Wencek said. “I always point to the wet spring when numbers are down, but I know there’s more to it than that, like habitat loss and pesticide use. Those are major factors, too.”
One thing Wencek and Scoones said that almost anyone can do to boost butterfly populations is to plant native flowers from which the adult insects can sip nectar, and plant the specific host plant that each species requires during its caterpillar stage.
“It definitely works,” Wencek said. “I planted hops, and it brought in question marks. I put in pipevine and we got a pipevine swallowtail laying eggs. You want black swallowtail? Plant parsley.
“These bugs are dependent on the host plant, so if climate change hinders that plant’s ability to thrive, it will hinder the ability of that butterfly to survive.”
While butterfly numbers appear to fluctuate widely from year to year, Wencek has observed a slight decline in overall numbers in recent years. It is especially noticeable with the very common species, which he said are still common but he is noticing fewer of them.
Looking to the future, he said Rhode Islanders should expect to see more and more butterfly species from the South making the Ocean State their summer home.
“Every year starting about now, we start getting exotic southern butterflies that fly north until they die, which is an interesting phenomenon,” he said. “We’ll start seeing more of those in the future. Some years you might not see a ton of them, but expect it to be a more common occurrence.”
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.