Lettuce Share

My mom forgave me for telling the world what an animal hater she is and sent me an interesting email about butterflies, which she does not hate.  While visiting Rainbow’s End Butterfly Farm and Nursery recently, she chatted up the owner about the size of butterflies.  I mentioned that it seemed as if butterflies in New York are bigger than butterflies in Florida.  The owner of Rainbow’s End said this could be due to a common disease amongst monarchs.  Under New York law, she is permitted to export butterflies to Florida but is prohibited from importing them because of a disease commonly found in Florida monarchs. 

During my laundry room experiment, I remember reading about a disease called OE - Ophryocystic Elektroscirrha.  OE is a protozoan parasite unique to monarchs and milkweed, and it does indeed cause monarchs to be smaller in size, specifically they weigh less and have shorter forewings.  While Googling OE, I came across another butterfly farm, Shady Oak.  They have a page called Ask Edith; Edith is one of the owners and she addressed a question about OE.  Apparently, it’s more common in Florida because butterflies fly year-round and plants don’t freeze to the ground, so the cycle never ends.  In colder climates, spores die as the milkweed disintegrates in the winter.  In the warmest part of Florida, the southern tip, there is approximately an 85% infection rate compared with 30% or less in the rest of the country.  

After reading up on OE and its symptoms, it seems that I prematurely blamed the ants when it was probably OE that took my third and final butterfly baby.  Another symptom is that they’re too weak to hold onto the pupal case while their wings unfurl.  But to end on a happier note, here’s a photo of a beautiful female monarch warming its wings on the banks of the Hudson River.

I’m back from New York and finally back to blogging.  Since I never officially closed out my run with ABC Wednesday, I feel I should say Z is for Zip-a-dee-do-dah, I’m also back online!  I loved my summer vacation in New York visiting with friends and family, but it’s 2010 and I love my high-speed internet connection equally.  Getting so behind makes it tough to decide where to begin, but it makes sense to start back up with my go-to favorite subject - butterflies.  My mom and I spotted scores of them walking through the woods behind the Cary Institute.  This was one I’d never seen before - a Red Admiral:

The butterfly pictured above is a Northern Pearly-eye, and the one below is unidentified.  Help, please?

Once again I missed ABC Wednesday, but I have a good reason.  I’m in New York and my mother’s house seems to have a real problem with me having online access - same thing last summer.  And to make matters worse this summer, the neighbor wised up and secured his wireless connection.  It only takes one and my sister and her iBook may have ruined it for the neighborhood, so here we sit at the local library.  Yada Yada Yada…on to my Yikes!  When I landed in New York on Tuesday, the pilot announced, “The local temperature is a scorching 99 degrees.”  I thought he was Yanking my chain until I stepped out of JFK airport and felt the heat climbing up my legs like wildfire.  That combined with this familiar looking butterfly, I’m not completely sure where I am anymore…Florida, New York, the sun???  

On first glance, I thought this was a Gulf Fritillary.  But after thinking about it, one: it’s unlikely for this area and two: it’s just not orange enough.  Now I’m thinking Great Spangled Fritillary.  Check the pictures and see for yourself.  The heat minus the constant air conditioning of Florida has my brain feeling Yucky.   

The only thing unattractive about milkweed is its name.  Weed carries a negative connotation for most gardeners; it implies pesky or intrusive, but milkweed is neither.  It produces bold little blooms and attracts over 160 species of butterflies!  I thought it was just monarchs, but they’re simply the most familiar because monarchs feed solely on milkweed.  Depending on where you live, milkweed will attract viceroys, queens, skippers, fritillaries, and more.  This is only one of the five monarch caterpillars I’ve seen in the past two weeks on my two milkweed plants.

John called me a nerd when I stuck this bumper sticker on my car, but I love it!

Luke and I did our usual stroll through Phillippi Estate today.  Since dogs aren’t normally allowed in the park, I always take full advantage of the fact that they’re allowed at the farmers market.  We go almost every Wednesday so when I locked the door and realized my camera was still inside, I shrugged and headed to the car.  I already had some m’s in mind for today…mums, mango, milkweed.  But then I spotted two Monarchs Mating on the hammock trail!  Nooooooooooooooooo!  Why didn’t I grab my camera???  To use a couple more M’s, the Mating Monarchs seemed to be Mocking Me More every extra Minute they remained Mounted like a Magnet in the trees!  This isn’t the first time YouTube has come to my rescue.  The video is a little long, but a couple of seconds will show you how the butterflies were perched in the trees.       

They flew twice to reposition, or one flew and the other hung on.  It reminded me of some research I came across when hatching Monarchs in the laundry room.  This is from The Last Monarch Butterfly: Conserving the Monarch Butterflies in a Brave New World by Phil Schappert.

Male Monarchs use their size and mass advantage to aggressively ‘attack’ and subdue other Monarchs, grappling in the air and falling to the ground, where they attempt to mate.  If successful in obtaining a copulation the male will carry the female to a shrub or tree to finish mating.  An intriguing side issue of this tactic is that smaller males are often the target of attacks by larger males and male-male interactions among Monarchs are relatively common.

Yikes!  If you didn’t know this was Lettuce Share, you might think I was talking about the behavior of prison inmates over sweet delicate butterflies!   

It’s actually called hemolymph, but it looks like human blood.

I’ve scoured the Internet and library and haven’t found much information on the process of butterfly wings drying.  Well, there’s some, but it’s all about the hemolymph pumping through the wings as they unfurl during metamorphosis.  I found it far more interesting, and somewhat puzzling, to watch them drip dry red.

The puzzling part was the color of the hemolymph.  The drops on the newspaper were clearly red, but here’s a drop on the wing:

Oxygen is the only logical explanation; I found that butterfly hemolymph is normally the color seen in the latter shot.  This is a definition for hemolymph from The Lepidopterists’ Society: 

Hemolymph:  The typically yellowish colored fluid that carries nutrients (though not oxygen) around the body of the butterfly; the lepidopteran version of “blood”.

After four missed metamorphoses, I feel lucky to have a caught a glimpse of the golden hemolymph before the oxygen seeped in!

It’s been lonely around here this week.  Two of the butterfly babies are flying free, and one is lifeless under glass in my kitchen.  Part nature, part nurture, I’m sad to say he didn’t make it.  He seemed to have problems from the beginning.  This is his chrysalis:

The brown spot was worrisome but didn’t match up with descriptions of any life-threatening problems such as black death or OE.  But it seems that when he emerged, he dropped to the countertop.  I, of course, did not see it, even though I woke up early, brought a chair into the laundry room and read the entire paper from said uncomfortable chair.  Then I went to get my laptop, got distracted for ten minutes, and came back to this:

Normally, they hang from their chrysalis while their wings unfurl and dry.  It’s the reason caterpillars crawl endlessly to find the perfect spot.  The spot has to be roomy enough for them to spread their impending wings.  In this case, the countertop didn’t seem suitable.  I lured him onto a wooden skewer and placed the skewer over the top of the plastic pot he had originally anchored to. 

He was fine, so I left him to dry.  When I came back, he was back on the countertop.  He may have fallen; he may have tried to fly.  Either way, it’s strange behavior.  The others all hung very still and very close to their chrysalises for the first few hours. 

When he tried to get up, it looked like his legs were slipping on the granite.  It was sad watching him flop around like that, so I intervened - big mistake!  I thought he would get better traction if he was on dirt, so again he grabbed the skewer and I moved him to a big planter pot.  There isn’t a plant in there, just some soil and a few weeds…so I thought.  But it wasn’t ten minutes before I went back to check on him and those savages were attacking - a gang of miniscule thugs crawling all over him, stabbing tiny holes through his brilliantly orange wings.  They are one of the few Floridian creatures to survive the cold snap in huge numbers and the bane of my gardening existence - ANTS!

They’re actually starting to build up now.  We’re hosting the ant equivalent to Dubai on our brick pavers, which was okay with me before they did the unimaginable.  There must have been some prior squatters who sent the word because ants were flooding down the window into the pot.  By the time I got to the butterfly, his wings and body were covered with ants and…his legs were gone!  I flicked off the ants, but it was too late.  His wings weren’t moving.  The whole experience was horrifying.  I feel like an accessory to murder! 

But my poor judgment doesn’t excuse those murderous little ants!  It seems that they’re dropping Monarch populations in places other than my laundry room.  William Calvert conducted a study in Texas that suggests fire ants are contributing to the reduced monarch population.  But they normally eat monarch eggs not monarch legs; I didn’t find anything about that.  Among Calvert’s testing sites, there were more than double the eggs in areas where fire ants were kept at bay.  He greased a wall to keep them out.  I’ve tried baking soda and vinegar, instant grits and boiling water…maybe it’s time to pull out the Crisco! 

Hello world! 

Two and counting…and from what I hear about children, rearing butterflies seems somewhat similar.  They don’t like you to sleep or shower.  I woke up to the formerly impatient caterpillar, who is pictured on the bottom.  And when I got out of the shower, the one on top had just emerged. 

I’ll have to let them go when the weather clears up tomorrow, but I’m open to name suggestions anyway.  The butterfly formerly known as the impatient caterpillar is definitely showing personality.  He’s a little bugger!  His buddy hadn’t even dried his wings before he was up in his face giving him a wing-bump.  They’re definitely bro butterflies - scent glands are present on both.  Only one chrysalis is still hanging on.  I expect he or she to emerge the minute I sit down to eat.

By far, my favorite saying to come out of seven years of social work is ”The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  When I saw black spots on my newly relocated chrysalis, it was the soundtrack running through my mind.  The day before, I was hovering over the little pupa taking great care not to drop him or even jostle him too much during the move.  But as much as I tried to keep the chrysalis steady, for a brief second, he tapped the tip of my pinky finger.  The black spots had me thinking maybe the oils in my hands had poisoned him somehow.  But when I went to check on him before bed, he was starting to show the first clear signs of transformation from chrysalis to butterfly!    

Right on schedule, it’s been ten days since he first cocooned.  My intentions were worthy; I’m just a nervous mommy.  I’ll be watching all three very closely over the weekend.  I’d hate to miss the transformations again. 

My grandmother always said, “Haste makes waste.”  It’s true for anyone, even a caterpillar.  The last two caterpillars roamed for over a day to find their perfect spot, but this first one anchored under the first leaf he found.

I use he because the female Monarch population is dropping but also because only a man would be so impatient and impractical!  The leaf had been gnawed down to a stem and dried up within days.  It had just about snapped off when I rigged the chrysalis back up with some thread.  But again it didn’t hold in place.  The future wings were resting on the stem of the milkweed, which didn’t give him enough room to spread ‘em on emergence.

He needed more space.  Here’s his upgraded digs - the handle of a planter pot.