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  • From: "Nick Routledge" <fellowservant@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: air shows
  • Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 01:56:46 -0500


Found myself at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens this am having a long
discussion with a retired employee who has spent the past ten years given
over to a consuming passion for butterflies and their habitat. A
delightfully eccentric soul. And I've never heard anyone describe their
life as given over to "observation" as much as she. I do believe she
literally spends hours a day, every day, in her garden, moving very
slowly, observing. "You've got to use a magnifying glass," she said.
Imagine Sherlock Holmes as a green-thumbed lepidopterist (issat howitz
spelt?). Russ also enjoys an ear. She had driven into town to hand me a
small treasure trove of seed, harvested from her garden - A-list nectar
plants, it appears. (Once I decipher her handwriting and notes, I'll know
what we've got.)



I fished for a permie angle during our chat but none really seemed to pop.
I'd been thinking in broad terms. If indeed, as Dostoevesky put it, the
world is gonna be saved by beauty, then anyone with an eye for Nature
would allow that butterflies hold clues for the remaking of Paradise. But
what woz in it for permies? What about plant communities? "No, I don't
know anything about that," she said. So, I mostly listened. Then, later,
headed down the freeway outta Alabama into Mississippi, fueled on a
luncheon of gumbo and deep-fried catfish fillets, mulling over the
morning's conversation, I 'ad me one of those 'oly fockin' Jayzzzus
moments.



Turns out that you can have all the finest nectary plants in the world in
your backyard, but if you ain't also got the larval host plant peculiar to
the preference of a caterpillar's tummy tum-tum, then the occasional
butterfly tourist is the only airshow you'll get. Now, I didn't quite grok
the implications of the larval host story during my chat with Russ, so I
didn't push that angle, but I did look up the briefest glimpse of the host
list at the back of "The Butterflies of North America" by James A. Scott
(1986), the definitive b-fly text of the moment. A monumental work. The
list is rather an eye-opener. A not-too inaccurate generalization would be
that every b-fly has its own particular larval host. Hmmm. Lotsa trees,
for example. Nettles. You name it. Now it strikes me that if we know a
butterfly's host plant, and we also know its favorite nectar plant, then
shazzam, weez perhaps got ourselves two plants in the same "guild". Or
take two butterflies with different larval hosts, but which favor the same
nectar plant. Shazzam, perhaps three plants in the same guild. The
butterfly, the connector.



Now, admittedly, I'm stretching here and the plant picture ain't anywhere
near as clear as it might be. We can find definitive lists of larval host
plants specific to individual butterfly types but, for the most part, no
categorical tie-ins of _the_ favorite nectar plant (or at least I didn't
find any on the freeway this pm). They browse. But Russ inferred that
there are definitely preferences. As an aside, the very structure of
salvias appears to have co-evolved, to feed butterflies and hummingbirds:
likewise b-flys will, she said, turn their proboscis up at "garish
hybrids...they'll fly right past them." So, tho' no quick answers, there
are definitely solid leads. And that's what really rocked my boat today -
the implications of incorporating centuries worth of butterfly
intelligence into the plant guilding story. The wrinkles are endless -
there's a b-fly larva in Britain that's fed by ants, who milk it. What
interrelationships do the ants bring to the guild picture?



And this, of course, is simply the butterfly story - just "one" "small"
aspect of Nature's web. It could be that we need simply the input of one
more related field (bird behavior, for example) to deepen the context and
tip the butterfly-plant db story into a guilding revelation. And what
happens when another hundred specialities with knowledge of specific
plant-animal-insect interrelationships come on board?



That's the strength of a distributed virtual db techne. It can
interconnect centuries worth of collective observation of Nature to reveal
patterns far, far beyond the deductive abilities of any one individual
permie. In guilding cyberspace, we reveal.



Only interconnect.



n.

"A flower is a leaf in love." - Goethe




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