A Man Attempted to Regenerate A Rare Species Of Butterfly In His Garden
California’s pipevine swallowtail named adult butterflies have blue iridescent wings and they are thought to be the most vital and fascinating types seen in the North American region according to the collectors. These pretty butterflies would mostly be seen in San Francisco over centuries and over the Bay Area. But, with the increasing urbanization in the early 1900s, this species began to disappear. Today, it is very rare for people to see them.
An aquatic biologist at the Academy of Sciences in California conducted a research on this species of butterfly and his studies seem to be up-and-coming. Tim Wong created a special enclosure for these butterflies in his own backyard and he said that this enclosure helps them being protected from predators, creating a better for environment for mating and that the enclosure serves like a laboratory to study and observe these butterflies and to understand better the criteria for female insects finding themselves ideal host plants.
After preparing their habitat, Wong looked for twenty caterpillars from various regions outside the city and he gathered them with permission. Later, he transported the caterpillars to his backyard and set them in the newly created mating and feeding enclosure of insects. Six weeks later, caterpillars started to become beautiful butterflies and females left small and red eggs. So, the project was succeeded. After some generations, the number of insects started increasing incrementally. Wong didn’t have enough space for all of them, so he donated some of the caterpillars to Botanical Gardens, where the nutrients for butterflies were being produced.
In just a few months, Wong was transporting thousands of butterflies, instead of hundreds. This repopulation attempt of blue winged butterflies was succeeded in Sonoma and Santa Cruz as well. However, Wong was first one to do it around San Francisco.
In the 1980s, a woman named Barbara Deutsch also gave it a shot to repopulate this species, but her attempts vanished within just a few years. As for Wong, he cultivated over 200 of pipevine swallowtail plants, without any sign of pesticides or herbicidies. He said that anyone can improve habitat for native fauna even in their own garden.
