It is Cold Outside. Where did all the Butterflies Go?

Great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele)
Its tiny caterpillars will survive the winter
© Beatriz Moisset

Winter has arrived. What happened to all the six legged creatures we saw in summer? Where did the crawling, scuttling, flitting, buzzing multitudes go? Those of us who live in temperate and colder climates notice the disappearance of practically all insects when the weather gets cold. We are talking about the ones that live outdoors, not about those aggravating creatures that turn our houses into their homes.

Red admiral (Vanessa atalanta), one of the travelers
© Beatriz Moisset

Some of our favorite butterflies illustrate three different winter strategies.
1. Most adult butterflies die, the next generation lives on
2. A few migrate to warmer climates
3. Even fewer hunker down and wait for spring to come

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Beginners Guide to Pollinators and Other Flower Visitors

© Beatriz Moisset. 2016
 

Monarch Butterfly, a Case of Mistaken Identity

Male monarch butterfly

© Beatriz Moisset

 A few days ago, I arrived at my favorite native flower garden at Churchville Nature Center with my camera, looking for pollinators as usual. A mother, also with a camera hanging from her neck, was visiting the garden with two children.

Black swallowtail caterpillar on fennel

© Beatriz Moisset

Milkweed tussock moth caterpillar

on common milkweed

© Beatriz Moisset

She pointed at a fuzzy, hairy, colorful caterpillar eating milkweed leaves. "Look at the monarch butterfly caterpillar," she said to the kids.

I couldn't stay quiet, "It is a tussock moth caterpillar," I explained.

"Oh, yes," she saved face by adding, "it will turn into a large moth, the tussock moth."

Later, she moved to a fennel plant and announced: "this is the plant that monarch caterpillars need for food."

The real thing, monarch caterpillar on common milkweed

© Beatriz Moisset

Should I have corrected her again? I would have to explain that monarchs feed only on milkweeds. Black swallowtails are the ones that need fennel. I simply walked away shaking my head.

Monarchs, monarchs, monarchs! I thought. How often people mistake anything else for monarchs?

Tiger swallowtail

© Beatriz Moisset

Just a few days earlier, a gentleman photographer at Pennypack Nature Center was busy snapping shots of something I couldn't see at the time. "There is a monarch right there." He pointed at a gorgeous large black-and-yellow striped butterfly with trailing tails on its wings, nothing like the orange and black monarch.

"It is a tiger swallowtail," I told him.

Fritillary butterfly on butterfly weed

© Beatriz Moisset

Then, I remembered all the times when people look at my framed photo of a fritillary butterfly and ask me if, or even tell me that, it is a monarch. All this sounds like Elvis Presley's sightings.

From pandas to dolphins to monarch butterflies: some animals become iconic. The monarch butterfly is, perhaps, the most iconic of all insects. Entomologist Marlin Rice (Iowa State University) referred to the monarch as the "Bambi of the insect world." This spectacular butterfly acquired its fame, in part due to a movement devoted to preserve the monarch and its remarkable migration. The movement is sponsored by websites such as Monarch Watch, the Monarch MonitoringProject, and a few others listed in the Walter H. Sakai's website. They are all worthy causes that engage the public; these projects can use the income generated by all the publicity.

I applaud the efforts of these organizations. At the same time, I wonder: A poster child is valuable if it raises awareness of a broader issue. The ecological importance of the monarch butterfly is that it is one of many species at risk because of human-caused habitat degradation. Other species may not be as appealing as the poster child, but they deserve our attention, too.

Red admiral, sometimes mistaken for a monarch

© Beatriz Moisset

The real thing, monarch butterfly on common milkweed

© Beatriz Moisset

Milkweeds, Monarchs and More: The Milkweed Community 
List of articles
Beginners Guide to Pollinators and Other Flower Visitor

© Beatriz Moisset. 2013

POLLINATORS IN WINTER. Fritillaries

Where do pollinators go in winter? When all the flowers that pollinators feed on are gone and when the cold grips the land, what do the pollinators do? They have to find refuges and hanker down until the next season. There are many different strategies at their disposal, many sheltered places, many options as to spend the winter months as eggs, larvae, pupae or adult. But they all make themselves invisible for several months of the year, hoping that no predator or parasite gets to them and hoping that the next season be bountiful and take care of their needs.
Here is just one example of a wintering pollinator, a pretty butterfly that you may see flitting around the garden during summer months: a fritillary butterfly Speyeria cybele.

Adult fritillaries are colorful butterflies of orange and black patterns, often mistaken for monarchs. Their long tongues enable them to reach for nectar hidden in long throated flowers such as horse mints, however they are not about to pass out a good opportunity to drink nectar from more accessible blossoms. You may start seeing them as early as May; by October they will be mostly gone or will look rather worn out, missing wing scales or even a piece of wing where a hungry bird took a stab and missed the body.
In late summer and early fall the females start looking for places to lay their eggs. Their babies feed exclusively on violets, so they need to find these plants and lay their eggs nearby. But by this time of the year violets are drying up or they are all but gone; only the roots remain under ground in many cases. This does not deter the egg laying females; either they have a formidable sense of smell that enables them to detect the roots of violets, or, in some cases, they just take a chance scattering their eggs on the leaf litter in shady places that are most likely to grow violets. In this case, some eggs will be lost, but there will be plenty left which will find their target.

The eggs are no bigger than a period at the end of this sentence; the caterpillar that emerges from it shortly afterward is about the size of a comma. Packaged inside this tiny body is all the genetic information needed to make all the colors and the beauty that will visit your garden fluttering from flower to flower during the warm months. There is no food for this baby during the winter months. So what is there to do? It promptly buries itself in the leaf litter seeking safety from the many small predators and parasites that hunt it in that dark and mysterious world that is the soil of your garden. There, it has nothing to do for several long, cold months; so it goes to sleep.

Probably many, perhaps most won’t make it through the winter; but the mother had laid so many eggs that there will still be plenty to keep the species going. By the end of winter it will be aroused, by some unknown cues. By then, violet plants are beginning to grow. Long before they start blooming, this caterpillar goes to work, feeding and growing for a couple of months. It will eventually emerge as a fully grown butterfly.

More on fritillaries life cycle in:
Pollinators welcome blog
Pollinator of the month
List of articles © Beatriz Moisset. 2012