Almost everyone likes butterflies, but of course there are exceptions to every rule. One when I gave a presentation to a group of younger elementary students at a local school, I said that everyone likes butterflies and a little boy in the back emphatically said No! He hated butterflies! Still in talking to thousands of K-12 students he was the only one that voiced such a strong dislike for these colorful creatures.
On the other hand I once had an enquiry from a local woman who voiced her love of butterflies. However she very definitely wanted to rid her garden of nasty caterpillars and wondered if I could tell her how to do so without harming the butterflies! The thought that some of her caterpillars were immature butterflies did not occur to her.
I could write a whole diary just on butterfly metamorphosis, but suffice it to say that this process is quite remarkable in that the rather dumpy (although often beautiful in its own right), wingless, short-legged, chewing, and simple-eyed caterpillar has to completely reorganize its body while in the chrysalis state in order to emerge as a totally different organism with wings, long thin legs, a rolled-up tube-like proboscis for sucking up nectar, and compound eyes.
In reality the very concept "butterfly" is suspect. From an evolutionary standpoint butterflies and skippers are only day-flying moths. In phylogenetic trees butterflies and skippers are nearly in the middle of the branches. Indeed, some "true" moths, such as some tiger and sphinx moths, are often seen in broad daylight nectaring or just flying around. The common name "butterfly" comes not from the charming idea that kids used to call them "flutterbys" and the letters just got transposed, but from the yellow species that looked like flying pats of butter!
We have over 700 species of butterflies in the United States and Canada, but the other members of the order Lepidoptera outnumber them over 10 to one. Still 700 species is a lot of butterflies. Generally they are popular enough that people often buy special seed packets labeled "Butterfly Garden" and some spend considerable time watching them. Several handbooks are available just for that purpose. I should know as I took part in a total of 19 "Forth of July" butterfly counts for the North American Butterfly Association (NABA), as well as several Bioblitz days sponsored by the National Audubon Society, in which butterflies were among those organisms for which I was responsible.
Why bother about such things as butterflies? That question might well be asked by someone not familiar with the intertwined reality that we call a biotic community, or of the fact that however we deny it, we are part of and dependent upon that community. Butterflies are part of that community; perhaps not as important in a practical sense as algae or vascular plants, but they are part of what we humans perceive as beauty, they serve as pollinators of flowering plants, and they are fed upon by birds, lizards, spiders, and other predators. They can also act as bio-indicators of the condition of the environment.
Butterflies and skippers are divided into the Papilionidae, Pieridae, Lycaenidae, Nymphalidae and Hesperiidae in the arid Southwest. The Nymphalidae, in which only the two back sets of legs are used for walking, used to be divided into several families, but all of these were united a few years ago based on relatedness studies. The Hesperiidae was also divided into two families- the giant skippers and the "typical" or common skippers, but this seems to have been changed as well. The old "families" are now relegated to sub-family status. One has to keep in mind that any classification system devised by humans is essentially artificial, especially above the species level. However even the definition of what is meant by the term species is not as exact as one would like it. Evolution continues on and species are to some degree fuzzy because of this. Natural selection did not stop functioning, even on us, with the advent of civilization and in fact we have been a rather severe selection pressure on countless organisms, including butterflies.
In the Southwest deserts and mountains of the United States there is actually a very large fauna, with southeastern Arizona often having higher summer counts for NABA than anywhere else in the country. Even in New Mexico mountains and desert there are often over 100 species known for a given area, although they all don't fly at the same time. One thing I learned on the butterfly counts is that no year is exactly the same as another and some years are radically different from the year before. This is a result of the chaotic nature of weather and other related factors. If rains don't fall in a particular area in the winter or spring, or if the seeds of a particular food plant are not available even if the rain does come, or if there are few females that laid eggs the year before, the numbers of a particular species can be radically suppressed. Nature may be in overall balance, but it is a dynamic balance. This is not at all helped by some human activity. Butterflies can, as noted earlier, act to a degree as canaries in a coal mine in regard to environmental degradation, but you have to know the history of the ecosystem involved.
Below the fold is a short gallery of the butterflies that I have been able to photograph in the Southwestern deserts and mountains.
Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor), Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae), Gila National Forest, New Mexico.
Cabbage White (Male) (Pieris rapae), Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Sara Orangetip (Female) (Anthocharis sara),Organ Mountains, New Mexico.
Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus), Organ Mountains, New Mexico.
Mormon Metalmark (Apodemia mormo), Organ Mountains, New Mexico.
Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia), Organ Mountains, New Mexico.
Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), Desert Botanical Gardens, Phoenix, Arizona.
Painted Crescent (Phyciodes picta), Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park, New Mexico.
Mylitta Crescent (Phyciodes mylitta), Gila National Forest, New Mexico.
Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis), Organ Mountains, New Mexico.
California Sister (Adelpha bredowii), Gila National Forest, New Mexico.
Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), Gila National Forest, New Mexico.
West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella), Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
American Lady (Vanessa vieginiensis), Big Bend Ranch State Park, Texas.
Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia), Desert Botanical Gardens, Phoenix, Arizona.
Red-bordered Satyr (Gyrocheilus patrobas), Cave Creek Canyon, Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona.
Monarch (Danaus plexippus), Mesilla Park, New Mexico.
Queen (Danaus gilippus), Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park, New Mexico.
Arizona Giant Skipper (Agathymus aryxna), Cave Creek Canyon, Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona.
All photos are by me.