Over the week, Molly Korzenowski reported in Minnesota Zoo to release 400 endangered Dakota skipper butterflies:
. . .The Hole-in-the-Mountain is a 1,364-acre preserve south of Lake Benton in Lincoln County. When the Nature Conservancy bought the site in the 1970s, butterflies were a common site. Carpeted with wildflowers during the summer, it’s an excellent spot for rare prairie-dependent insects, including about 25 species of butterflies, according to the Conservancy.
In an effort to preserve the Dakota skipper, the Minnesota Zoo will release nearly 400 of the butterflies on the preserve. Starting Saturday, screened metal boxes containing butterfly chrysalises will be moved to the prairie for hatching. Zoo staff will visit the site daily to let butterflies go and to monitor the number of species in the area for a couple of weeks.
“It’s a conservation-centric task to get those individuals back out in the wild and sustain the species in a better way,” said Minnesota Zoo butterfly biologist Erik Runquist.
This year’s butterfly release is part of a reintroduction program created by the Minnesota Zoo in partnership with the Nature Conservatory and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The zoo has been raising Dakota skippers for five years in hopes of introducing the species back to the wild.
“We’ve been very successful,” Runquist said. “We are actually the only organization in the world that has been rearing and breeding Dakota skippers.”
The zoo released 200 skippers in 2017 and 250 in 2018. This year will be the last release before the team takes a step back to see whether the population will be sustainable in the long term. According to Runquist, they will do a butterfly count, document behaviors, and check to see whether the butterflies are breeding.
Read the rest at the Pioneer Press. We grew curious about where the Zoo obtained its butterfly stock. In a 2017 article on the Zoo's webpage, A Milestone – Reintroducing a lost prairie butterfly for the first time, we learned:
Behind the scenes since 2013 though, Minnesota Zoo scientists have established and grown the first and only conservation breeding program for Dakota skippers. Working under rigorous protocols established in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies, we have been collecting a limited number of eggs under from relatively large populations within the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate’s Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota as well as from the last known population in Minnesota, near Moorhead. These eggs are brought back to the Minnesota Zoo and reared through to adulthood the following summer. The Minnesota Zoo is the first and only institution to successfully breed multiple generations of Dakota skippers entirely in human care. We are literally writing the book on how to raise and breed Dakota skippers.
Here on the Lake Traverse Reservation, prairie lilies, conflowers and other native flowers are starting to bloom in abundance, and so we're not surprised that some of the Dakota skipper breeding stock at the Zoo have origins in our stretch of the prairie. We've been keeping an eye out for them--and are happy that a nearly 1000 acres stretch of grasslands along "Old 81" was recently acquired by a couple interested in grassland preservation.
For more about Dr. Runquist's butterfly conservation research, see our post from this January: Video: MN Zoo's lepidopterist & conservation biologist testimony on saving prairie butterflies. We noted then:
In Thursday's meeting of the Minnesota House Environment and Natural Resources Finance Division, the Minnesota Zoo made made an appearance to let the committee members know about its educational and conservation work.
As always, the zoo animals brought before the committee--in this case a porcupine, a bullsnake and a chinchilla--were the stars for the media. But after the charismatic critters left the stage, the Zoo's lepidopterist and conservation biologist Erik Runquist testified about the organization's work to save butterflies and other pollinators.
We post video of the testimony below. It made us eager to pay more attention to the tiny prairie butterflies that do still live up here on the prairie grasslands of the Coteau.
Photo: The Dakota skipper is an endangered butterfly in North America. (AP Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Phil Delphey, File).
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