Raising Pipevine Swallowtails: an example of backyard biodiversity

July 8, 2016 9:47 PM

Tim Wong is an aquatic biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, but in his off-hours he raised pipevine swallowtail butterflies in his back yard in San Francisco, where the butterfly was now hard to find. His efforts have been successful to reintroduce Battus philenor to a region where the species is much less common than it used to be. You can join Tim and the folks in the North American Butterfly Association in improving backyard biodiversity by creating butterfly habitats, or even raise your own swarm or kaleidoscope of butterflies.

As noted in the Pests in the Urban Landscape blog from the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Don't Eat 'em; They're Poisonous! This is true of both the pipevine swallowtail butterfly and their food of choice, the Aristolochia, also known as pipevine, Dutchman's pipe, and birthwart. In fact, Aristolochia gigantea, giant Dutchman's pipe, is poisonous to the swallowtail caterpillars.

If you want to know more of Battus philenor in the greater Bay Area, check out the article on these butterflies on Art Shapiro's Butterfly Site (U.C. Davis).

posted by filthy light thief (15 comments total)

I planted milkweed last year and got Monarchs. If you plant it, they will come! Sadly, none of the caterpillars survived. Between global warming and Bay Area rain, I think the eggs were laid too late and the rains came. I was told to cut the milkweed back in the fall so they won't lay eggs in the wrong season so I will do that this year.

I plant to attract native pollinators and hummingbirds. Many pollinators only eat one type of plant.

Thanks for posting this!
posted by shoesietart at 3:28 AM on July 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

He carefully transported them to his backyard and set them loose on the plants to feed.
"They feed as a little army," he says. "They roam around the pipevine plant from leaf to leaf, munching on it as a group."

Then at some point the cycle will swing the other way. I remember my father cutting down huge, just really huge nests of caterpillars to burn. Folks would have long poles with a torch at the end to burn them at the end of a limb. One did not go barefoot as there was no where to walk without squishing. Really gross. And killed a lot of trees and plants.

Balance is hard.
posted by sammyo at 5:16 AM on July 9, 2016

I love rearing caterpillars. It's easy* and rewarding and despite the fact that someone always says "oh we did that in first grade" I find it never gets old or trite. Somewhat selfishly, it's also the only way to know the sensation of a butterfly's proboscis probing the whorls of your fingertip as you feed it sugar water, fueling it up before releasing it where you found its egg.
*easy if you can stay on top of their leaf devouring curve and anticipate when they're going to pupate. I've had monarch caterpillars in the 5th instar polish off all the milkweed available overnight, shrug their little prolegs and say "whelp, time to pupate I guess" and wander off from the open enclosure. I was lucky enough to catch them crawling down the table leg and give them a nice alternative spot to pupate.
This is in contrast to my colleague, who also hosts caterpillars in his dining room. He is a bit more lassies-faire about them and therefore the underside of his dining room table is festooned with chrysalis cases by the end of the summer.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 7:22 AM on July 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

the underside of his dining room table is festooned with chrysalis cases by the end of the summer.

This post may inspire an entire new genre of horror films. </shivers>
posted by sammyo at 8:35 AM on July 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

nests of caterpillars

"nests" are a different kind of caterpillar: tent caterpillars (I believe they grow into moths). Most butterflies (all the species I know about anyway) form individual chrysalises.
posted by amtho at 8:50 AM on July 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

One of the surprise joys of our house was discovering that we are on the monarch migration path. We've turned a vast portion of our one acre into native habitat for them and other fauna. Our neighborhood was destroyed by storms in December and April, and everyone is still rebuilding, so folks hadn't been doing much landscaping outside of removing trees and other debris. As we're all having to replace trees and whatnot, I went to a local tree farm, and talked to them about getting volume discounts for putting in native trees instead of the trees the builders put in 20 years ago, and then went around to all 23 houses and explained what I'd done, and how they could all get this pretty big discount by going native, and why native vs invasive would be better both ecologically, and from a future loss standpoint, since most of the native trees like red oak and pecans all survived, and none of the things like Bradford pears did. So far, every tree I've seen going in has been native, which is awesome.

We are personally holding off on doing repairs to structures in the back until after mating season for a few species of birds, bats and butterflies that call the backyard home, because we're going to have to tear out all the vines that are covering the buildings that were destroyed. (We still don't have a roof on the main house yet, so the backyard can wait until we have a roof, and new ceilings, and drywall, and carpets...basically I've just ceded the outdoors to whatever lives there for now.)

Next on my neighborhood list will be trying to convince everyone to give up on manicured golf course-like lawns, and instead let the native prairie grasses and wildflowers sprout. I don't hold out as much hope for that, but I'm hoping that when they see all the butterflies in my back yard, that it might be an easier sell to show that we don't need a ton of chemicals or water to have a gorgeous and environmentally responsible yard, we just have to give up the implied status that comes with a manicured lawn. Fingers crossed.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 9:01 AM on July 9, 2016 [10 favorites]

My partner and I recently bought our first house, and one of the things we intend to do when we're slightly less worn out by the gutting-and-replacing projects we have inside the damn thing is go to town replacing all of the plants with natives. The hell with lawn; natives are much less water-demanding and our city is barely out of a ten-year drought anyway, plus they require much less care on my part to stay alive. I don't think I have the energy to fuck around with raising my own insects right now, but I certainly have colleagues in my department who do things like that in their own spare time. Besides, planting insect-friendly fauna outside encourages the sorts of insects who would rather live outside anyway...

If you're interested in helping biodiversity by growing more native plants to your area but not sure where to start, the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center offers a searchable database of plants which are native to every single state in the US (and several regions of Texas, where they're based). It's a very thorough database that includes information about which plants are particularly friendly to wildlife, which are edible, and also things like which can grow in full shade or need minimal water. They also have advice on planting natives in container gardens, choosing good plants to support butterflies in your area, and even native lawns that are composed of native grasses which make a solid turf.

I've been growing native Salvia species for a few years now, and it's been really rewarding to see the bees swarm on my little red flowers, and also to see them coming back and self-seeding in my little pots. Now that we're in the new place, I'm eagerly awaiting the local native plant sale so I can stock up on cool things I've never been able to fit in a pot before.
posted by sciatrix at 9:14 AM on July 9, 2016 [9 favorites]

One of the nicest things we did when we bought our first house was put in a butterfly garden very visible from all the back windows of the house. The star is of course milkweed for the monarchs, but there are a bunch of other native flowering plants favored by local butterflies and bees, and the patch swarms with interesting insects all summer. It's anchored with a dwarf crabapple tree that's favored by birds in the winter seeking berries. Any window we glance out, at any season, we see butterflies or birds.

And it basically takes care of itself, the native plants don't need watering, only rarely need weeding (invariably to root out morning glory), and resow themselves with no intervention from us. We typically wait for a weirdly warm weekend in March (so winter wildlife can use the cover and eat the seeds until then) and cut all the dead stuff down, which takes 20 minutes, and that's basically the maintenance for the whole year. This year we did have to trim and thin the crabapple a bit since it had a little storm damage where the limbs were crossing and on one end it's growing towards our phone line, but that's not bad for a 10-year-old garden.

It used to be a little more visually pleasing with short plants in the front and tall ones in the back and the colors nicely planned out, whereas due to its self-care and self-reseeding it's now all intermixed and some of the plants have really flourished while others are more lackadaisical, but that's okay.

(We also, incidentally, used swamp milkweed at our gutter outlet; we built a miniature stream from the gutter to a little depressed pool some 25 feet away from the house because the prior owners had the gutter outlet right above the sump so it just cycled constantly, it was stupid. We planted the little depressed pool with swamp milkweed (which is less-pretty than the bright orange milkweed you're probably familiar with, it's a rather drab pale pinky-purple -- don't be fooled by online nursery pictures where it's a bright pink-purple, it's that color for like ONE DAY), which is DELIGHTED to live through cycles of soaking and drought, and it is now a zero-drama water situation with tons of butterflies and nobody realizes that's actually where our gutter drains and takes ages to soak in in the spring. We lack the "wet spot in the lawn" most houses around here have because ours is a secret butterfly rain garden.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:58 AM on July 9, 2016 [10 favorites]

Maybe it's because we're in the Pacific Northwest? But we've planted plenty of native plants and they still get choked out by weeds. It feels like I'm always weeding.
posted by aniola at 10:28 AM on July 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

We're tallgrass prairie country so obviously conditions are quite different, but we've found the first 2-3 years native perennial plantings require a fair amount of weeding to get them established well against invasives, but once they're well-established they don't need much help, and only a few of the invasives (notably morning glory, for us) are willing to go up against a mature native plant stand. Everything else either gets choked out early in the spring when the natives are the first things up, or drowns in May when it rains for six weeks, or dies a horrible death in late July when it's a billion degrees and dry dry dry and the natives are the only things that like it. (The variability of our climate during the growing season probably contributes to the success of natives because not many plants like to be literally in standing water for a month and then starved of moisture for a month.)

We've also found, over time, that size of the planting matters ... we have a very large native plant stand now, in a different area, and it's MUCH HARDER to get it well-established and keep up with the weeding in a big planting. If we did that one again we'd probably chunk it up into 4 or 6 smaller bits and plant one each year, comprehensively defeating weeds as we went. As it is it requires more ongoing weeding.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:05 AM on July 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is so cool and food for caterpillar gardening thoughts, too.
posted by y2karl at 11:08 AM on July 9, 2016

Hey, I know Tim! We met at a bar ~5 years ago when he commented on a tillandsia I was using as a lapel pin and we've been friends ever since. He is one of the coolest people I know, hands down- his house is a botanical wonderland with an insane collection of epiphytes and lithops, and an ever-more-elaborate butterfly setup which has become this awesome big deal. He's a real class act and it's great to see him getting the recognition he deserves.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 2:39 PM on July 9, 2016 [9 favorites]

I accidentally raised some cute caterpillars as a kid, one did pupate out of the lot, and emerged. A lovely male Monarch. I have always wanted to do it again.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 3:02 PM on July 10, 2016

In eight years I restored our backyard in North Austin. When we bought it, it was a sunbaked square of dirt, with a couple crepe myrtles and a dying oak tree. We just moved and I left the yard a lush paradise with beds full of native plants, vegetable gardens, mature fruit trees and berry bushes, mature native trees, the oak tree recovered and stands of native sunflowers. In the beginning the only "wildlife" in the yard were Grackles. By the time we left we had Cardinals, Jays, Chickadees, Housefinch, Goldfinch, Wrens, Hawks, Owls, Tree Frogs, Toads, Garter Snakes, Solitary Bees, Wasps, squirels (damn squirels! Could have done without them) and a huge number of butterflies. In paticular the Gulf Frutillary Butterflies were breeding on our native Passion Flowers. My husband said it looked like a set from the Muppets out there with so many little creatures flying around. I can't wait to do the same thing for our new property! Going to join the local native plant society asap. They are super helpful and their monthly meetings are fun and very informative.

Also seconding The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center website as a fantastic source of info on native plants and gardens.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 2:49 PM on July 11, 2016

PS thanks for the great post Filthy Light Thief!!!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 2:50 PM on July 11, 2016