Insects as ornaments
If you are a person who demands spectacular results from the plants in your yard or garden but who doesn’t want to spend all your free time battling insects intent on eating holes in those plants, it may behoove you to widen your outlook. By which I mean, look beyond planting merely for the three Fs: foliage, flowers, and fruit; and rather than gearing up to fight off insects you don’t want to see, consider deliberately attracting the ones you do want to see. Some landscape plants don’t mind the occasional visit from a hungry insect and can even benefit from same, leaving you with a yard full of great-looking plants and beneficial and attractive insects like the beautiful little Atala butterfly, Eumaeus atala Poey.
Ask IFAS is a great resource for information about butterflies and the plants that sustain them. A recently updated Ask IFAS featured creatures publication by Sandy Koi and Donald W. Hall, for instance, has much to reveal about the long friendship between Atala butterflies and Florida coontie. They have a truly inspirational story. But first! A quick quiz.
Quick quiz:
When are we happy to see holes eaten in the foliage of the plants in our yards?
- Never
- When I was thinking about replacing that plant, anyway
- I don’t have any ornamental plants in my yard. Only yams.
- When the foliage is not only lovely in and of itself, it is food for even more lovely butterflies!
The answer, obviously, is 4. Who wants to look at a bunch of perfect leafy branches that just sit around where they’re rooted only occasionally wobbling a bit if there’s a stiff breeze when one could have a host of living jewels in constant lilting motion in the air all over the garden? Butterflies can sometimes do the job of ornamental plants better than the plants. They catch the eye of the passerby and in general make the whole scene look like it was animated by the Nine Old Men. There’s simply nothing like a crowd of them floating around and filling the airspace to drag attention away from the odd landscaping lapse: the broken fence picket, the unweeded pineapple patch, the weathered garden gnome face down amid the unraked leaves…
Light dawns
I arrived at this “insects can be ornamental” philosophy only this fall after I planted a bunch of passion fruit vines I bought at a fall plant sale*.
I planted the passion fruit vines because I wanted to eat some passion fruit after many, many months, but then I noticed that almost the moment I put them in the ground, the air became thick with Gulf fritillary and zebra longwing butterflies.
I examined the holes the larvae of those butterflies made in the leaves on my new vines and found them not particularly unsightly, and I noted plenty of leaves left on the plants that would allow for the photosynthesis requisite for them to produce fruit in the far-away summer. Anyway, I did not have to wait for summer because it was like the vines bore fruit immediately, only the fruit was beautiful butterflies!
Then I thought, “Well, hey, isn’t this instant gratification scenario better, anyhow? These passion fruit plants are quite likely to freeze if we have a winter like the one a couple of years ago, and if they lose all their leaves in a frost, I won’t get any fruit. Besides! I’m already growing figs mostly to feed area birds; why not revisit my goal for these vines and decide that their main purpose is to feed butterflies?”
Brrr…*
Then, and of course I should have predicted this, there were blizzard conditions in Gainesville the other week and the passion fruit vines—and EvErYtHiNg eLsE—froze to the gray and lifeless ground.*
Now, having learned for about the fiftieth time that draping an old sheet over a cold-sensitive plant will not keep it alive through the winter if the temperature happens to stay in the low twenties for days on end*, I intend to plant some cold-hardy, drought-tolerant Florida coontie in the hope of one day attracting yet another lovely little butterfly, the one that is the subject of this blog post, the Atala. (Honestly, these bleak and frigid days I would love a visit from any butterfly or moth or grub or even a lovebug or a mosquito. Spring seems a long way off.)
*Why?!? (A mid-blogpost lament)
Why do they have plant sales in the fall in north Florida? In the fall, I stress, when most of the yard plants for sale stand an excellent chance of freezing in the fast-approaching winter? Knowing this, why do I go to the fall plant sales every single year? Or, there are always plenty of houseplants at the fall plant sales, so if I can’t stand to skip the sales, why don’t I buy houseplants instead of yard plants? But no! Every year, it’s: “I’ll plant this soursop against the south-facing garage wall and the garage will block the wind plus the residual heat from the sunbaked cinderblocks will prevent the plant from freezing to death when nighttime temperatures drop to the low twenties for six straight hours each night for three nights in a row.”
Florida coontie, then and now
Before
Florida coontie, Zamia integrifolia, is North America’s only native cycad. It’s also a plant from which, after a lengthy series of steps to remove the lethal toxic compounds inherent in cycads, you can get arrowroot, a flour you can then use to make delicious, carbohydrate-rich snacks.
For most of our history of interacting with it, we humans have considered coontie a food plant. Florida’s indigenous people learned how to make nutritious, safe arrowroot flour from the toxic roots. They relied upon coontie as a staple food, planting and tending it carefully.
After
When Europeans arrived, they, too, began eating coontie roots. In fact, they liked to eat coontie so much, they built whole factories to process it, and then baked the starch up into all sorts of comestibles, among them animal crackers. This industry was not well-thought-out, however: it harvested and processed coontie in great quantities, but it did not plant or tend coontie, a remarkable oversight, given each coontie plant takes a decade to grow to harvestable size and harvesting the root kills the plant.
Further endangering the species, coontie habitat, like all Florida habitat not on fire or underwater, was attractive to developers, so most of the coontie plants that escaped being turned into animal crackers succumbed to bulldozers. With its staple crop nearing extinction, the US domestic arrowroot industry crashed. That problem, combined with the fact that coontie requires careful processing to be edible and people occasionally made mistakes and poisoned themselves along with livestock and domestic animals, reduced coontie’s attraction as a source of calories.
Florida coontie today
Although contemporary Floridians no longer use coontie for food, interest in the plant has not waned. In fact, it is experiencing a resurgence. More and more communities are learning that it makes a great landscape plant and growing it in our yards and sometimes along roadsides, in medians, and in public spaces. This is a wonderful development for the Atala butterfly, which requires coontie to live and thus nearly went extinct along with its food source.
With its growing popularity, Florida coontie has expanded its range outside southeast Florida and can now be found in much of the state. Atala butterflies have followed their host plant, and they, too, now live in many places in Florida outside their original range. Wherever they travel together, the plant and the butterfly each contribute to the other’s sustenance. Caterpillars eat the coontie’s poisonous leaves, which not only nurtures them, it renders both the caterpillars and the adult butterflies lethal to potential predators. In turn, the Atala caterpillars’ frass (poop) enriches the soil around the coontie plant and helps the plant grow.
Atala butterflies
Adult Atalas are small, elegant butterflies whose striking coloring makes them appear to be dressed up for a night at the opera. With wings folded closed, they are velvety black with brilliant iridescent blue-green speckles.
They are even more impressive with wings open, when the ‘fit rivals anything you might see on the red carpet. Complementing the splendor of their wings, the top halves of their bodies are deep black with patches of iridescent blue or green, and their tail ends are a surprisingly bright red-orange. They accessorize this riot of color tastefully with legs and antennae in the same gorgeous, velvety black
Again, because larval Atalas eat only coontie foliage, the species declined precipitously during the long period when people were yanking all of the coontie out of the ground to assuage their hunger for carbs and clear land for construction. However, beautifully dressed though they are, Atala butterflies are definitely scrappers, and they did not succumb.
For decades people thought the Atalas were extinct. Actually, they had persisted in a tiny surviving colony on a barrier island off the Miami coast. From that small population they have managed to expand and stage a comeback in several Florida counties.
Finding their native range largely denuded of their essential food plant, they have spread out and established new populations distant from that original home range. It is thought that they found sufficient coontie plants in commercial ornamental plant nurseries to keep enough of them alive to survive and make their northward journey. The cold, droughts, storms, and everpresent threat of development in habitats new and old continue to create challenges and setbacks, but nevertheless the Atalas have held firm.
What you can do
If you would like to join the dedicated and growing fan base of Floridians who are working to sustain this epic LTR between a beautiful butterfly and an attractive plant, why not plant some Florida coontie, yourself? If you live in an area with lots of coontie nearby and an existing population of Atala butterflies close to you, the mission is relatively easy. You can help simply by planting more coontie in your yard to give the Atalas more territory.
In areas with relatively fewer coontie plantings, the likelihood of attracting butterflies to your yard may be smaller. On the other hand, when you consider how old this relationship is and how many existential challenges it has weathered successfully, it becomes clear that the effort is still worthwhile. Plant all the coontie you can for future Atala caterpillars who may one day grow to adulthood in your yard, and work to make your yard a haven for adult Atala butterflies and other butterflies of many species by growing lots of the flowering plants that provide their food. Then sit back and observe!
Persist!
If you don’t see forty gorgeous jet black Atala butterflies the first spring after you plant food crops for them (or any Atala butterflies for many springs), don’t lose heart. You’ll almost certainly see other species of butterflies and an array of other fascinating and beautiful pollinator insects, all drawn to the flowers you’ve planted. Keep planting food for butterflies and keep telling your friends and neighbors and anyone who will listen about your efforts. Eventually, with effort and dedication, coonties and Atalas may become established and begin to thrive again in new places throughout Florida, delighting all who meet them. Until then, remember their inspirational story. The coontie and the Atala have kept going and supporting one another through droughts and freezes and lean times. So can we!
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