{"id":12834,"date":"2022-03-09T11:00:20","date_gmt":"2022-03-09T17:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/?p=12834"},"modified":"2022-03-09T11:00:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T17:00:57","slug":"olympia-marble-butterfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/bug-of-the-week\/olympia-marble-butterfly\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympia Marble Butterfly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: All links below go to external sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Howdy, BugFans,<\/p>\n

\"OlympiaThe BugLady met this butterfly on a trip to the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge one fine, spring day when the bird\u2019s foot violets were in bloom and the interrupted fern fiddleheads were unfurling.\u00a0 She thought it was a bit too small (and early) to be a standard Cabbage White butterfly, and the picture languished in the X-Files until recently.\u00a0 In retrospect, it\u2019s not often that she thinks \u201cDarn \u2013 I wish that butterfly would close its wings<\/i>\u201d as she\u2019s taking its picture, but on an Olympia Marble, all the action is on the underwing<\/a>. \u00a0She\u2019ll just have to find another one.<\/p>\n

The Olympia Marble<\/a> (Euchloe<\/i>\u00a0olympia<\/i><\/span>), aka Olympian Marble and Olympia Marblewing, is in the family Pieridae (the Whites, Sulphurs, and Yellows).\u00a0 It\u2019s found in a wedge-shaped patch of ground in the middle of North America, plus some disjunct populations in the Appalachians and Texas, and it\u2019s the easternmost of the seven North American Marbles (Wisconsin and Michigan have the greatest numbers of the species).\u00a0 Within its range, it is local and uncommon; according to\u00a0The Butterflies of Iowa<\/u>, \u201cpopulations are often small; only single individuals are observed at a given time.\u00a0 This, in combination with the emergence of this species before most other species, has led Loess Hills lepidopterist Tim Orwig to call it \u2018our loneliest butterfly<\/i>.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a habitat specialist – look for it in dry meadows and knolls, barrens, open woodlands, sand prairies, dunes, and (today\u2019s vocabulary word) \u201calvars<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Scenic Side Trip #1 \u2013 alvars and alvar pavement grasslands.\u00a0\u00a0Alvar<\/i>\u00a0comes from a Swedish word that refers to barrens and grasslands growing on very thin soils over limestone or dolomite bedrock.\u00a0 Sometimes there\u2019s no soil covering the rock at all, and plants grow in deposits of organic material caught in fissures (\u201cgrikes<\/i>\u201d).\u00a0 Alvars may have floods in spring and droughts by mid-summer.\u00a0 They’re an uncommon plant community – many kinds of\u00a0alvars<\/i> are globally imperiled – and they\u2019re found most commonly in the Baltic region of northern Europe, counties Clare and Galway in northwest Ireland, and around the Great Lakes (one Wisconsin alvar is protected as a State Natural Area).\u00a0 Mosses, lichens, grasses, and sedges are common; the sparse woody vegetation is often stunted; and these unique plant communities often host rare plant and animal species.\u00a0 Here<\/a> are some pictures].<\/p>\n

Olympia Marbles are just a shade smaller than the very common Cabbage Whites, and individuals that live on Great Lakes coastal dunes are slightly smaller than those inland.\u00a0 When newly-emerged, they wear a rosy pink wash<\/a> on the undersides of the wings, and when they sit on a plant and close their wings, they tend to disappear<\/a>.\u00a0 The more-heavily-marbled Large Marble\u00a0<\/a>lives north and west of Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

These are weak, but direct, flyers that stay pretty close to the ground and have a short flight period.\u00a0 Males patrol on hilltops in May, flying back and forth purposefully just above the ground.\u00a0 What do dry meadows and knolls, barrens, open woodlands, sand prairies, dunes, and alvars have in common?\u00a0 Rock cress (formerly\u00a0Arabis\/<\/i>now\u00a0Boechera spp.<\/i>) \u2013 straggly, low-growing members of the mustard family (click on any picture for a slide show<\/a>). \u00a0Females lay single eggs on a flower bud; the young caterpillars eat the flowers and seed pods, and the older caterpillars<\/a>\u00a0feed on the fruit, leaves, and stems.\u00a0 Apparently, the Whites \u2013 members of the subfamily Pierinae \u2013 have a habit of nectaring on the same species that host their young, but adults also feed at phlox, lupine, chickweed, and wild strawberry flowers, and several others.<\/p>\n

By the end of June, the show is pretty much over.\u00a0 Caterpillars turn a purplish color when they\u2019re about to form a chrysalis, and the fresh chrysalis is also rosy, too, but it turns brown in fall so it\u2019s camouflaged<\/a> through the winter. \u00a0They spend 11 months as an inconspicuous chrysalis attached to a host plant, emerging in May (one source said that under certain circumstances, they might remain in the chrysalis for three years).\u00a0 There\u2019s a single generation per year.<\/p>\n

Early butterflies need strategies for warming up in the cool temperatures of mid-spring.\u00a0 Olympia Marbles expose the sides and the upper surfaces of their wings to the sun (lateral and dorsal basking) – a passive way of collecting the sun\u2019s warmth in order to heat the thorax so they can fly.\u00a0 Some insects add \u201cmuscular thermogenesis\u201d \u2013 quivering muscles within the thorax to raise its internal temperature – but Olympia Marbles don\u2019t have that in their bag of tricks.<\/p>\n

How can we make the world a better place for these butterflies?\u00a0 Preserve favorable habitat with plenty of host plants.\u00a0 They are susceptible to pesticides used to control gypsy moths and to prescribed burns.\u00a0 Because they are such specialists, it doesn\u2019t take much habitat destruction to wipe out a small, local population.<\/p>\n

[Scenic Side Trip #2 – Gypsy moths.\u00a0 After much discussion within the Entomological Society of America, 50 scientists voted recently on a new name for the Gypsy moth, because the former name was considered offensive to the Romani.\u00a0 From more than 200 suggestions they picked the \u201cSpongy moth,\u201d a reference to its sponge-like egg cases.\u00a0 The French were way ahead of us \u2013 the moth is already called \u201cspongieuse<\/i>\u201d in France and in parts of Canada.\u00a0 The BugLady is all for not insulting people, but seriously \u2013 the best they could do is\u00a0Spongy<\/i>\u00a0moth???\u00a0 Next up \u2013 the Japanese beetle, because some feel that the strong language used by some pest control businesses can cross the line into the xenophobic.]<\/p>\n

–The BugLady<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Howdy, BugFans, The BugLady met this butterfly on a trip to the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge one fine, spring day when the bird\u2019s foot violets were in bloom and the interrupted fern …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30795,"featured_media":12835,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bug-of-the-week"],"yoast_head":"\nField Station<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/bug-of-the-week\/olympia-marble-butterfly\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Olympia Marble Butterfly\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Note: All links below go to external sites. 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