News Stories

July 17, 2007

DAVIS - To spark interest in the rarely seen California state insect and efforts to protect it and its habitat, the R. M. Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis has published a first-of-its-kind poster immortalizing the dogface butterfly (Zerene eurydice).

“The dogface butterfly is found only in California, but it’s losing its natural habitat due to rapid California development,” said Fran Keller, a UC Davis doctoral student of entomology who designed the poster.

“I’ve been all over California collecting beetles,” Keller said, “and I have never seen a California dogface butterfly in the wild.”

Nor has she seen its main host plant, False indigo (Amorpha californica), a riparian shrub that grows among poison oak and willows and along stream banks, often in steep and isolated canyons. Dogface butterfly larvae feed on the False indigo.

“Its main host in our area, the Napa False indigo, is rare and endangered,” said Bohart Museum volunteer Greg Kareofelas, a Davis naturalist and photographer who scanned the butterfly images for the poster. “Elsewhere in the state, its host plant is the False indigo and while not endangered, it’s still difficult to find.”

Rare plant botanist Kristi Lazaro of the California Native Plant Society, Sacramento, said the Napa False indigo (Amorpha californica var. napensis) is known from approximately 45 occurrences in Marin, Monterey, Napa and Sonoma counties.

“Many of these occurrences have small numbers of plants,” Lazaro said.

Strengthening the link between the insect and its main host is crucial to its conservation, said Bohart Museum director Lynn Kimsey. “We need to preserve and protect that relationship.”

The California dogface butterfly, so named because of the poodle-like head silhouetted on the wings of the male butterfly, officially became the state insect in 1972. Its image appeared on a U.S. Postal Service stamp in 1977. This summer the distinctive butterfly has reappeared on another U.S. postage stamp: this time on a new 41-cent “pollination” stamp issued to emphasize the ecological relationship between pollinators and plants.

Keller hopes that the poster, like the first-day stamps, will be a collector’s item.

“I’d like to see this poster in every classroom in California,” she said. “Sometimes the best way to educate is to make something pretty.”

The Bohart Museum will gift a framed copy to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month.

The 18-by-24-inch poster, the work of volunteers Keller and Kareofelas, features a multi-colored male, sometimes called “a flying pansy,” and the larger, mostly yellow female.

The male is from the Kareofelas’ butterfly collection, and the female is from the Bohart Museum collection.

The fast, high-flying butterfly is elusive except when it feeds on flower nectar, said internationally renowned butterfly expert Art Shapiro, a UC Davis professor of evolution and ecology who co-authored the newly published Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions with T. R. Manolis (UC Press, 2007).

“I’d say only one of every 10,000 Californians has ever seen the butterfly in the wild,” he said.

Shapiro, who donated more than 60,000 butterflies, including 25 to 30 dogfaces, to the Bohart Museum, said he’s seen only 200 to 250 dogfaces during his 36 years of collecting butterflies. One flew across his driveway in Davis. He remembers the exact date: April 26, 1972.

“The dogface is largely restricted to riparian habitat in the Sacramento Valley and in the Coast Range and Sierra foothills,” said Shapiro, whose study sites span Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, Nevada, Placer and Sierra counties.

Dogface adults apparently hibernate, Shapiro said. They begin flying in March before their host plant, False indigo, leafs out. A new brood arrives in late spring/early summer, and apparently another in September-October, but rarely in November.

More information on the California dogface butterfly is on Shapiro’s Web site at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/butterfly/Zerene/eurydice.

The California dogface butterfly poster is available for $18 laminated or $15 non-laminated at the Bohart Museum, 1124 Academic Surge, UC Davis, bmuseum@ucdavis.edu, (530) 752-0493. It may be ordered online at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/ or on Fran Keller’s Web site at http://www.tenebrionid.net/. All proceeds benefit the Bohart Museum outreach program.

(Editor's Note: For photos of the scientists and enlarged poster of the California dogface butterflies, see

 

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http://www.ucmrp.ucdavis.edu/news/dogfacebutterfly.html)