Butterfly Conservation

This week, the Imperiled Butterfly Conservation and Management Conference met at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum near Chicago, Illinois. A highlight of the program is the release of adult Baltimore Checkerspot Butterflies, a species that is rare in the area. The release is a culmination of a project to rear larvae to the adult stage.

The Baltimore Checkerspot spends the winter as a caterpillar. Many insects, including the Baltimore, suffer high mortality during the winter. This requires conservationists to rear many caterpillars in order to get a few butterflies to release. In nature, the caterpillars feed through August, then go into an overwintering stage (diapause). One of the breakthrough observations for the overwintering checkerspots is the importance of high humidity. Efforts to rear the butterflies through the Chicago winter were not very successful until it was discovered that adding moist plaster to increase the humidity of the rearing container would increase survival of the caterpillar.

The goal of many Butterfly Conservation Programs is to use rearing and release to re-establish populations of butterflies that are self-sustaining. Local extinctions of butterflies most often occur when their habitat is destroyed. If the habitat is later re-established, there may not be new individuals in the area to re-establish the insect population. Programs to rear and release butterflies can help speed up the process of re-establishing butterfly populations.

Baltimore Checkerspot
Photo: Rich Kelly
http://bugguide.net/node/view/298339/bgimage