Currently ranging from Biscayne National Park to Key Largo and Lower Matecumbe Key, the Schaus Swallowtail Butterfly is dwindling with populations numbering less than 1,000 individuals. The primary reason for decline is loss of habitat, use of insecticides, collection of the larvae, and extreme weather conditions. Recovery efforts for this endangered species includes captive breeding programs to help restore the population.
To the right is the range of the Schaus Swallowtail Butterfly. We have to do better and hopefully there are still some individuals left in the wild.
Posted Friday, 04.23.13
by Curtis Morgan
cmorgan@miamiherald.com
By their nature, (click here) South Florida’s tropical butterflies have always been ephemeral creatures, coming and going with the rhythms of the life cycle and season. Now they’re just gone.
by Curtis Morgan
cmorgan@miamiherald.com
By their nature, (click here) South Florida’s tropical butterflies have always been ephemeral creatures, coming and going with the rhythms of the life cycle and season. Now they’re just gone.
In what may be an unprecedented die-off, at least five varieties of rare butterflies have vanished from the pine forests and seaside jungles of the Florida Keys and southern Miami-Dade County, the only places some were known to exist.
Marc Minno, a Gainesville entomologist commissioned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to perform a major survey of South Florida’s butterfly population, filed reports late last year recommending that the Zestos skipper and rockland Meske’s skipper — both unseen for a decade or more — be declared extinct. He believes the same fate has befallen a third, a Keys subspecies called the Zarucco duskywing, and that two more, the nickerbean blue and Bahamian swallowtail, also have disappeared from their only North American niche....
