AP: No confirmed Miami blues on Bahia Honda Key, FL since July 2010

[Mike Quinn]

Threatened butterfly vanishes in last Fla. refuge
By JENNIFER KAY
The Associated Press
2/15/2012

BAHIA HONDA KEY, Fla. — For more than a year, Bahia Honda State Park
biologist Jim Duquesnel traversed the nature sanctuary with two hopes.
He wanted to see a Miami blue butterfly and rid the Florida Keys
outpost of as many iguanas as he could.

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No confirmed Miami blues have been seen on Bahia Honda since July
2010, and with each passing day it becomes less likely any exist
there. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last August issued an
emergency listing of the Miami blue as an endangered species and three
similar butterflies — cassius blue, ceranus blue and nickerbean blue —
as threatened. The emergency listing continues through April, and
federal officials may make it permanent.

In the listing, federal officials noted that the only surviving Miami
blue population appears to be a few hundred living in the Key West
National Wildlife Refuge, about 50 miles west of Bahia Honda.

After the monstrous winds of Hurricane Andrew blew through the islands
in 1992, no Miami blues were to be found and many thought them
extinct.
But seven years later, a colony of 50 was found in Bahia Honda and it
slowly grew.

Their population grew into the hundreds, until they were easy to spot
year round from public trails. Jaret Daniels, a butterfly specialist
at the University of Florida, remembers Miami blues landing on his
hat.

"You could always swat them away. There were hundreds," Daniels says.
"I'm sure thousands of people walked by with Miami blues flying around
them."

Daniels and other scientists collected Miami blues from the park for a
captive breeding program at the University of Florida's Maguire Center
for Lepidoptera and Environmental Research. Roughly 30,000 were bred
in a lab from 2003 to 2010, and Florida scientists transplanted the
butterflies in the Upper Keys to try to expand the Miami blue's
geographic range.

None of those colonies survived, but scientists clung to hope for the
species because a new population of Miami blues was discovered in 2006
on a remote island in the Key West refuge.

But then, after a 2008 drought followed by cold snaps in 2009 and
2010, the population in Bahia Honda began a significant decline. Green
iguanas soon emerged as a likely suspect in their demise.

The large, vegetarian lizards, probably the descendants of pets
released by their owners when they grew too big or burdensome, had
developed a taste for the nickerbean leaves where Miami blues laid
their eggs. The nickerbean was among the only plants to quickly
recover from the cold snaps, and the iguanas chewed through them,
likely eating any butterfly eggs clinging to the leaves.

When Duquesnel was hired in November 2010, he saw 40 or 50 adult
iguanas a day in the park. Now he sees just a couple big ones a day,
and they're harder to catch because they've adapted to his hunting and
trapping.

It's too soon to say whether more than a year of trapping iguanas has
had any significant impact other than reducing their numbers,
Duquesnel said recently. The iguanas he catches now still have bellies
full of nickerbean, and the plants show signs of being nibbled, but
whether iguanas or insects are to blame, he can't say.

full text:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46393935#.T0QUX4cgfd1

Mike Quinn, Austin
________________
Texas Entomology
http://texasento.net


 
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