Butterfly experiment a prairie masterpiece in the making
William Mullen, Chicago Tribune
Issue date: 9/30/09 Section: News
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Their medium was not oil paint or watercolors, but dark little caterpillars that will turn into Baltimore checkerspot butterflies.
They dipped their brushes into cups, picking up one or two of the tiny, quarter-inch creatures on the tip, and transferred them just beneath the leaves atop slender stalks of turtlehead, a native wetland prairie plant on the grounds of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Batavia, Ill.
It is an experiment, said Taron, curator of biology at Chicago's Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. If it goes according to plan, 20 or so of the caterpillars will gather in leaf litter at the base of the stalk as the plant dies and hibernate in a loosely spun web as a colony for the winter. In the spring, they will wake up, pupate into the chrysalis stage and emerge as adult butterflies.
"This is one of the flashier butterflies in this state," Taron said of the Baltimore checkerspot, a big, dark-winged butterfly with wings 2 to 3 inches across, spattered in patterned orange and white spots.
Taron and Vincent Olivares, the Nature Museum's director of arthropod conservation, are Midwest pioneers in trying to captively breed rare and endangered butterfly species in large numbers and restore them to nature, hoping they repopulate natural areas where they have not lived in many decades.
The Baltimore checkerspot is not an endangered species, but because Illinois has less than 1 percent of the checkerspot habitat that it had 200 years ago, they are a rare sight, Taron said.
"What we're doing is a pre-emptive strike, taking action before it becomes a seriously endangered species," he said. "We'd like to keep it away from becoming endangered."
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