Where are you, Gulf Fritillaries?

The Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) population seems to be diminishing this year around Solano and Yolo counties.

A few here, a few there, but not in the large numbers of last year.

Last summer the Gulf Frits overwhelmed our passionflower vine (Passiflora), their host plant, and skeletonized it.

Which is what we want them to do. We plant Passiflora for them, not for the fruit or the blossoms.  On a good year, they eat it all--blossoms, fruit, leaves and stems--and look for more.

The history of the butterfly in California is as striking as its silver-spangled, reddish-orange coloring.

“It first appeared in California in the vicinity of San Diego in the 1870s,” says noted butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. “It spread through Southern California in urban settings and was first recorded in the Bay Area about 1908. It became a persistent breeding resident in the East and South Bay in the 1950s and has been there since.”

Shapiro, who has monitored butterflies in central California since 1972 and maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu,  says the Gulf Frit “apparently bred in the Sacramento area and possibly in Davis in the 1960s, becoming extinct in the early 1970s, then recolonizing again throughout the area since 2000.”

It's making a comeback, but this year it doesn't seem to be "coming back" so much.

Want to attract the Gulf Frit? Plant its host plant and some of its favorite nectar plants. In our pollinator garden in Vacaville, their favorite nectar sources include the butterfly bush (Buddleia), Mexican sunflower (Tithonia) and lantana (genus Lantana.)

Plant them and they will come--if they're around!

Sometimes there's a method to our madness, or madness to our method.

Take the silver-spangled, orange-reddish butterfly, the Gulf Fritilllary (Agraulis vanillae).

We spotted a female dive-bombing her host plant, the passionflower vine (Passiflora) in our pollinator garden in Vacaville. She circled, dipped, soared, and dipped again. She flew upside down, and right side up.

Ah, a photographic challenge!

We managed to catch her in flight, using a Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera mounted with a 105mm Nikon lens. We set the shutter speed at 1/3200 of a second to freeze the action. Other settings: f-stop of 5.6, and ISO of 250.  

Then we focused on the area where we thought she'd be. Look where she's going, not where she's been!

And what a gorgeous butterfly and what a beautiful ballet! Finally, she laid some eggs on the tendrils and leaves and vanished.

Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, says the Gulf Frit was introduced into southern California in the 19th century, and was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908. Once prevalent in the Sacramento area in the 1960s, it "seems to have died out by the early 1970s."

Then in 2009, the Gulf Frits began making a comeback in the Sacramento area.

This year the sightings are rather slow, but one butterfly ballet--just one--brings back the wonder of it all.

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."--Rabindranath Tagore

 When we think of orange and autumn, we think of the marriage of the Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), and the Mexican sunflower (Tithonia).

The silver-spangled Gulf Fritillary, a showy orange butterfly, looks like two different species. When it spreads its wings, it's orange. The underwings: silver.

"Dazzling," agrees butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology.

"This dazzling bit of the New World Tropics was introduced into southern California in the 19th Century --we don't know how-- and was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908, though it seems to have become established there only in the 1950s," he says on his website.

"It can be quite common in the East and South Bay --particularly in Berkeley--and has been found breeding spontaneously as far inland as Fairfield where, however, it is not established. There are scattered records in the Central Valley and even up to Folsom, perhaps resulting from people breeding the species for amusement or to release at social occasions."

The Gulf Frit bred in Sacramento in abundance on Passiflora in the early 1960s, Shapiro relates. "It seems to have died out by the early 1970s, however. Intolerant of hard freezes, it still managed to survive the record cold snap of 1990 that largely exterminated the Buckeye regionally!"

Its host plant: Passiflora or passionflower vine. Plant it and they will come (at least in this area)!

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."--Nathaniel Hawthorne

Gulf Fritillary caterpillars can skeletonize a passionflower vine quite rapidly. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

That's what we've been told for years. We hear that butterflies don't like the red ones, and that they may, in fact, be poisonous to them.

We've grown both in our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Calif.  Both flourished. However, we removed the red passionflower vine,  P. jamesonii, because the Gulf Frits avoided it.  They lay their eggs--and quite profusely, too--on our lavender passionflower (Passiflora incarnata), also called "Maypop." (In fact, every year they skeletonize them. Hungry, hungry caterpillars!)

Which brings us to the question from a reader: "I have the Maypop and Purple Passionvine, which is working well as a host plant for the Gulf Frit. I recently bought a Red Passionvine and then read it is poisonous to the Gulf Frit. Is it true?"

We asked butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, who has monitored butterfly populations in Central California for more than four decades and publishes his research and observations on his website.

"They don't use some of the red-flowered species," Shapiro says. "I don't know if they're actually poisonous. I've never found the bug on P. jamesonii around Ohlone Park in Berkeley, where there's tons of it. There's a large plant at the northwest corner of 3rd and B in Davis that may be this species, and they don't use it, either."

P. jamesoni, also known as "Coral Seas," (one of some 500 varieties in the world, see Wikipedia for the full list) is indeed striking with its brilliant red flowers.

As an aside, P. jamesoni is listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. That would be the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which describes itself "an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natural resource an international organization."

Justification for Being on the Red List:

"Passiflora jamesonii is endemic to the Ecuadorean Andes, where it is known from five subpopulations on both sides of the range. Only one subpopulation is inside Ecuador's protected areas network. The species seems to prefer untouched areas, so fires are a severe threat," according to the IUCN Red List.