Terpsichore

Brigitte named our presumably last Black Swallowtail this season Terpsichore—quite intuitively, I might add, because she’d forgotten how to tell a female from a male of this species, Papilio polyxenes. But she’d picked right. Terpsichore is a lady. The distinctive markings here are the white, indeed almost yellow, spots on the wings, tails, and the rear of the body and the distinctive and rather large blue markings on the tail reading up to the “eyes.”

The males, by contrast, shown on the left, have much more pronounced and more yellow markings; the blue spots, however, are quite small.

We found Terpsichore on some parsley we’d grown. The parsley was right next to a veritable forest of dill, which Black Swallowtails evidently prefer; but they like parsley as well. Brigitte had asked for a bunch for cooking. She had it in a glass jar on the windowsill awaiting the time for its use. And there, reaching for them, she noticed with delight that a caterpillar had grown large enough to detect. This was about the end of September—in a way quite late. We wondered if the butterfly would develop this season or whether, as we’d experienced at the old house with another late batch, it would wait until Spring to emerge from its pupa once she had formed it.

We’d had an earlier batch of Swallowtail this summer, but what with my deepening laziness, and its consequence of avoiding the LABORS of blogging, no note of those creature came to be written. Two of their names were Castor and Pollux; the third one, perhaps disliking “foreign” names, managed to crawl out of the box and disappeared before it was time to curl up for transformation.

Mind you, we now have a quite respectable stand of milkweed plants. But no Monarchs deigned to leave offspring at our new Butterfly Ranch. Good thing too. Distinguishing between male and female Monarch is much, much more difficult. Someday, perhaps, I’ll have a chance to address the subject…

Butterfly Mecoin

In what struck Brigitte as a meaningful coincidence, the New York Times today, on its front page, brought a story about the Monarch butterfly and Milkweed—to close out a year in which, in the context of butterflies, was a central event in our live this year. Meaningful coincidences, we gratefully note, are frequent enough so that Brigitte has coined a new word to refer to them: mecoin; it’s easier to write in diaries and such than the full phrase with 23 letters.

Yes, we saw our own milkweed—planted in what seemed an almost meaningless gesture to help save the Monarch from ultimate doom—bloom for the first time this summer. Today we discovered that we are not alone. Major public efforts, headed by such institutions as the University of Northern Iowa (once a neighboring state), the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas (we’ve lived in both of those states), along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Academy of Sciences are collaborating in the establishment of large tracts of land on which the milkweed, and other ecology-friendly weeds, will grow profusely and provide the thinning populations of the Monarch a little genuine hope. To this list I should also add the State of Mexico; it is also striving to reverse this most deplorable population crash.

It’s warmish out; the snow still lies fairly thick on the ground. As it rains steadily. The year is almost over. I thought I’d written all I would, this year, on butterflies back in November. But now a mecoin gives me one last chance to promote this worthy effort.

And, by the way, we are also providing milkweed seed we’ve harvested to members of the far-flung family so that our batch will multiply and once more fill the earth.

The Attack on Monarchy

Herewith a picture of healthy milkweed beginning to flower in our own backyard. It was planted late last year from a pot and has done very well indeed. This and similar varieties of milkweed represent the principal food source of Monarch butterflies—and grow copiously in soybean and corn plantations—hence represent a nuisance in agriculture. Our solution is chemical. Over the decades a major war of extermination—a kind of final solution—has been devised to get rid of the milkweed. The herbicide used is called glyphosate used in combination with genetically-modified and therefore glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybean. Modernity at work.

The consequence of this has been a major shrinkage of the Monarch population. One estimate suggests a 93 percent drop in the 1997-2013 period. That is more than significant. It’s been coming on slowly, but now we’re reaching what might be an end-stage. A scientific study (link), published in Insect Conservation and Diversity, shows recent results for the U.S. Midwest. In the 1999 to 2010 period, milkweed declined by 58, the Monarch population by 81 percent.

The Monarch over-winters in central Mexico in an area about 62 miles north-west of Mexico City; the nearest town is Michoacán, Mexico. There, in 1986, the Mexican government established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. It is about 138 acres in size (a tad over a fifth of a square mile), but, these days, fewer than 3 acres of that reserve are actually used by the Monarch—down from 7.14 acres last year. The same pattern there as here. Blaming the Mexican government for tolerating logging in that area has been used to explain the decline for years; but logging has stopped; and now the real reason has been tracked back to the ingenuity of Monsanto; its glyphosate is known as Roundup. Well, they’re rounding up the Monarch too.

Our own milkweed will multiply, we think. Okay, it’s just a gesture. Thus far we’ve seen no monarch in our glen, but hope springs eternal. And some gestures, eventually, become the new reality.

Palatial Birthing Chamber

The mysterious-looking image we present here is the covered cradle for five Black Swallowtail butterflies. Four of them are survivors of twelve!! eggs deposited by an early visitor to our butterfly ranch late in May. It laid its eggs on a quite small dill plant which, itself, had grown in the crack of our driveway but had been replanted in a pot. These four have now settled down and are about to develop their chrysalides. A Swallowtail Mom deposited the fifth one on another dill plant, of our own planting, later; it has a ways to go yet.

Each new year adds to our understanding—and lengthens the season. We’ve already dispatched two butterflies in May. They had spent all winter hibernating in our garage. We now know that the active season extends from early May to late September—when the last-laid eggs mature into caterpillars that form their chrysalides to sail through the winter frosts. We’ve already experienced raising multiple swallowtails simultaneously, but raising four from the same batch is something new. Meanwhile—and we noted this already last season—the Monarch is going through some difficult times. They are said to suffer from climate change and excessive use of pesticides. We saw very few of them last summer and, to date, only a single one so far. No chemicals are used here, at Rancho Mariposa, to be sure. And we even planted milkweed last year to send Monarchs a signal. No takers. Our advertising campaign needs a little work.

Danaus Plexippus

It rained yesterday off and on; the sun was not much evident. Late in the afternoon Brigitte noticed a butterfly, at rest on one of our cone flowers. We had moved that pot right next to our milkweed, and the visitor may have landed there first. Butterfly experts tell me that milkweed is the sole food for Monarch’s caterpillars. Our visitor was definitely a Lady and may have been engaged in leaving some offspring on that plant. We’ll see if that is so. Brigitte fetched me in a hurry—but by that time the visiting lady had moved a little bit further north and settled for a brief time on an azalea plant growing in our neighbor’s yard but reaching past the wire into ours. So today we bring our first photograph of a Monarch, such as it is.

The monarchs travel from Mexico to Canada and back again. It takes three generations to make the trip. The first of these wanderers (one of their names) appear in Spring. They’re most numerous in the Fall when they are headed south. Three generations suggests that they might be breeding both going and coming, so the extended visit of a lady pleases. The females are predominantly yellow, the males more reddish-orange. They belong to the Nymphalidae superfamily.

In the course of this current effort to document our visitors, I’ve discovered that it is very difficult to run down the meaning of any Latin biological name; these names are Latinized Greek, or Latin, or people’s names with Latin endings. In Greek mythology, Danaus was the son of a mythical Egyptian king—famed for having had 50 daughters; the usual gruesome thing: they were ordered to marry 50 men and to murder them on their wedding night, etc., etc.— welcome to ancient Greek modernity. But is that where the name is rooted? Are these lovely things the daughters of Danaus? Possibly. Monarchs utilize the toxins in the milkweed to discourage being eaten. — At the same time, somebody has launched the word that the name means “Sleepy transformation,” evidently pointing to the “miracle” of metamorphosis. But, here too, I am conflicted. Fledgling monarch caterpillars promptly eat their egg-shells; and if they find still unhatched brothers and sisters, they proceed to eat them too. Quite awake, actually. — Yet another source informs me that the name means “something like” “Greek horse-driver.” Many repeat this, too, on the web—and always also add “something like,” showing that they are copying. If any reader knows of an authoritative reference that supplies the meaning of these manufactured names, I’d appreciate hearing about it....