Saving the Atala Butterfly (by Accident?)

Atala butterflies were once thought to be extinct. It was a sad story and yet all too familiar. Their host plant, the coontie, fell prey to both commercial overharvesting as an edible starch in the 1900s (it had been harvested sustainably for generations before that time!) and severe loss of habitat due to development of the pineland forests where the native coontie was predominantly found. Atala butterflies, like many other beautiful and beneficial bugs, often develop specific relationships to native plants that they have evolved to be able to eat. With the Atala butterfly, its young could only eat the once-abundant coontie plant, and as the numbers of these plants dwindled, so did the butterfly. It got to the point where no one had seen an Atala butterfly for many years and they were widely believed to have gone extinct. It would have been an all too familiar tragic story...

But it doesn't end there.

It turns out the coontie plant or "coontie palm" as it is also called, is a beautiful, hardy, drought resistant and ancient plant which is also resistant to most pests and disease (the Atala butterfly did a remarkable thing when it evolved to eat this difficult-to-digest food source!). And landscapers became to notice how attractive they looked in people's yards. Soon people all over South Florida began incorporating the coontie into their yards.

And amazingly, the butterflies came back! They were just a few hidden somewhere, somehow all those years in a far off patch of pine forest where some stray coonties still grew. It was enough. The butterflies slowly at first, but have now returned in huge numbers. To the point where some landowners began calling in about the new "pest" on their coontie plants. The University of Florida's IFAS Extension gives recommendations on how to lightly manage the caterpillars if they begin to overwhelm young coontie plants and how to move them (or sell them to people who now want the butterflies!) to continue to rebuild both the populations of coontie plants and Atala butterflies.

It may just be one species, an ephemeral insect that lives for just a little while in our world. Yet the Atala butterfly is more than that. It is a thing of beauty, yes, but also, in its small but determined way,  it is a resilient piece in this world. Like us, it depends on the environment around it and is part of the interconnected web of life that we also call home.

And, if this could happen by accident, just imagine what we could do if we tried...



Credits:Saving the Atala Butterfly: A Success Story. Horticulture Magazine. https://www.hortmag.com/blogs/editors-blog/saving-atala-butterflies-success-storyFlorida Coonties and Atala Butterflies. Daniel Culbert. University of Florida, IFAS Extension. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/MG/MG34700.pdfPictures:1) An Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala). Photo by Scott Zona [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
2) Coontie Plant: https://www.south-florida-plant-guide.com/coontie.html

3) Atala Caterpilalr http://www.butterflyidentification.com/atala.htm