[Pollinator] Scientific American: Butterflies and Bombs

[Jennifer Tsang]

Thanks to Peter Boise for forwarding on the below article:

 



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mbs/ 


Butterflies and Bombs
<http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/03/26/butterflies-and-b
ombs/> 


By Laura Jane Martin | March 26, 2013 

 
<http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/files/2013/03/NCWRC110176.jp
g> The St. <http://www.fws.gov/nc-es/insect/stfrancis.html>  Francis' Satyr
is small, brown, and fabulously rare. Once found across North Carolinian
sedge meadows, the federally endangered butterfly is now restricted to a few
square miles. Its historical habitats, openings maintained by beaver dams
and lightning fires, are increasingly threatened by intensive agriculture.
The only place that currently harbors the species is closed to the public
for reasons of national security.

Ecologist Nick Haddad <http://www4.ncsu.edu/%7Ehaddad/>  has been visiting
Fort <http://www.bragg.army.mil/Pages/Default.aspx>  Bragg military base in
central North Carolina for ten years with net, notebook, and sharpie in
hand. He has special permission to work in the bomb ranges, where hot fires
from artillery rounds scorch the earth - much like lightning would -
allowing sedge meadows and their resident butterflies to persist. An
explosive ordinance disposal expert must accompany them on each trip. Nick
laughs: "The expert will point out a 40 mm shell while I watch butterflies.
We make a good team."

Having myself only seen a few flat line drawings of the St. Francis' Satyr,
I ask Nick to describe it. "It has a subtle beauty," he says, "a background
of brown intersected by red-orange stripes and rows of silver-blue eyespots.
Oh, and it is the slowest, most sedentary butterfly I've ever seen. Its
favorite activity is just sitting there."

While we tend to think of butterflies as bright flyers - most have evolved
to forage on flowers in open grasslands - Satyrs are part of a small group
that has evolved to live in places surrounded by forest. Fittingly, they are
named after the Satyrs of Greek myth, roguish and subversive companions to
Pan and Dionysus that roamed the woods playing their pipes. With
inconspicuous behaviors, tiny caterpillars, and a three day adult lifespan,
they can be a frustrating species to work with. After hundreds of hours of
searching, last summer Nick's team finally found one caterpillar in the
field, by accident, when a student dropped his sunglasses next to an
inhabited sedge.

"Something interesting happens in the field almost every day," Nick says,
"whether that's soldiers dropping from the sky, Black Hawk helicopters
flying low over the field site, or a truck towing a howitzer. I tell my
students that they're acclimated to research when they can tell the
difference between thunder and bombs dropping."

The St. Francis' Satyr monitoring project is part of a collaboration between
the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the Environmental Protection Agency,
and the Department of Energy that funds ecological <http://www.serdp.org/>
field research on military lands, everything from deep sea mapping of sperm
whales to climate change assessment in Alaskan boreal forests. With over
three hundred installations that cover nearly thirty million acres, the
DOD's ecological resources are vast. And because the DOD restricts access to
large tracts of land, many installations protect unique habitats. Fort
Bragg, for example, encompasses much of the intact longleaf pine savannah in
the South. On the other coast, Camp Pendleton spans sixteen miles of
undeveloped Californian shoreline and sustains over 1250 species, eighteen
of them threatened or endangered.

The U.S. military and ecological research might seem an odd match, but their
histories are deeply entwined. During the nineteenth century many biological
expeditions were motivated by military interests and funded by the federal
government. Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition across the United States was
for the express purpose of documenting plants, animals, and other resources
that could be exploited commercially. During the Spanish-American War, the
U.S. Navy employed botanists to survey western Pacific islands. Such federal
support of ecological research continued into the twentieth century,
skyrocketing after World War II when "radioecology" became a centerpiece of
the U.S. government's Atoms for Peace program.

Connections between ecological research and the U.S. military remain strong.
For example, the National Park Service is currently collaborating with the
U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. Nuclear Threat Initiative,
and Russian research institutes to develop a vaccine
<http://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/upload/ycrar01-2.pdf>  for
brucellosis, an infectious disease that affects humans, livestock, and bison
in the Yellowstone area. Brucella abortus, the bacterium that causes
brucellosis, was identified as a potential biological weapon during the Cold
War. In response, the former Soviet Union invested heavily in studying the
disease.

What would an ecology of war look like? War, by definition, brings
disturbance and rapid change. While rapid change often favors weedy species
- species that, because of their close associations with humans, we tend to
devalue - on occasion it can favor species we value. This observation has
led biologist Thor Hanson and colleagues to contend
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01166.x/abstrac
t>  that in some cases the weakening of sociopolitical frameworks during
wartime can "confer ecological benefits through altered settlement patterns
and reduced resource exploitation"; that war can be a "conservation
opportunity" when militarization restricts human activity. There are
examples of species that have rebounded with war. One such species is the
European plaice, a flat fish whose numbers skyrocketed during WWI because of
reduced commercial fishing. Other biologists have praised areas abandoned
during insurgent activity - such as the Hukawng Valley tiger reserve
<http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2004/mar/tigers/>  in Myanmar,
the Maquenque <http://www.protectedplanet.net/sites/115179>  National
Wildlife Refuge in Costa Rica, and Korea
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/13/wildlife-thriving-korean-
demilitarised-zone> 's DMZ - as hotspots of biodiversity. Biological refugia
created with land mines, razor-wire fencing, and forced emigration.

But the argument that war is good for biodiversity is a bleak one. It
suggests that humans are unable to occupy the same spaces as other species.
There are currently twenty-nine armed conflicts occurring, or more, or less,
depending on who is counting, and war preparation is estimated to occupy
nine million square miles. Must biodiversity conservation come through human
suffering? In taking the bomb field as nature's salvation, don't we assert
our inability to share the world?

Recently a number of biologists have called for a more hopeful ecology, an
ecology of "novel <http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/070046>
ecosystems" or "anthromes <http://ecotope.org/anthromes/> ." Unlike
traditional geographical frameworks like biomes, these new frameworks
emphasize that humans and other species do coexist
<http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090722/full/460450a.html> , sometimes
successfully. Indeed, over 75% of the Earth's terrestrial surface has been
impacted by human action. Humans are moving more earth and producing more
reactive nitrogen than all other terrestrial processes combined - not to
mention global <http://www.pnas.org/content/98/10/5466.full>  extinctions
and climate change. Humans must therefore count as a component of ecosystems
- an important component of ecosystems, these biologists contend.

To many it will seem obvious that humans are part of their environment, but
ecologists have historically ignored humans
<http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100716/full/news.2010.359.html>  in their
studies. This is changing. Conservationists are also taking heed. Many
things that humans do can promote biodiversity - conservation, after all, is
a human action.

The St. Francis' Satyr is a living juxtaposition of butterflies and bombs
that challenges the borders we take for granted between innocence and
corruption, nature and culture. Though butterflies might symbolize peace and
happiness, metamorphosis and rebirth, the St. Francis' Satyr can only do so
in bomb fields. They are a muddled metaphor, a humanized wildness.

We say that we understand ecosystems: What's the difference between thunder
and bombs dropping?

Image:  <http://mcgawphoto.com/> Melissa McGaw

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