Catching a Gulf Fritillary With Our New Butterfly Net

After receiving our new butterfly net in the mail today, we immediately decided to go out in the field and collect. . . 

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Butterfly nets are one of the best tools to catch live adults for laying eggs (See Lepidoptera Rearing Guide for more information). When we finally received our new butterfly net in the mail today that we ordered from Educational Science, we were pretty excited. This whole year, we have been starving to get our hands on some Western Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio rutulus) and the only option we saw was to catch a live female since the caterpillars only live up high in the tree tops! 

However, it was already a bit late when we decided to go out in the field today, past 4 PM. By this time, the sun was already starting to wane and most diurnal insects become less common. And because we were short on time since the sun was going to set all together soon, we actually decided not to go all the way to Albany Hill where we had encountered Western Tigers before and instead went down to the passionflower vine on the Ohlone Greenway at Lincoln Ave which is much closer to our house. The first time we went there, we managed to catch a live female Gulf Fritillary (Augraulis vanillae) with our bare hands and even got it to lay a bunch of eggs for us, but since then we have not been so lucky. Today, we were determined to put our new net to good use and catch a few more.

But when we got to the passionflower, it looked dead as ever. This entire year, we had noticed that it wasn't nearly as robust as it had been in previous years; more than half the vine was all dried up and dead and the few remaining living shoots were pretty unattractive. But today, it just looked utterly terrible since it was getting later into the summer and the weather was just getting hotter and drier. Needless to say, when we first got there, we were pretty doubtful of finding any Gulf Fritillaries around here any more. Plus, we had been seeing less of them flying around in general over the past few weeks.

However, after just a few minutes of standing there and feeling disappointed, we spotted one. Boy, were we excited. It took us a few swings before we finally caught it, but overall it was much easier and much more of a success than using a measly plastic cup or bare hands. But just as we were about to pat ourselves on the back for our first catch, we realized upon close inspection that the Gulf Fritillary was a male. Worthless. On second thought after catching it, the behavior of the particular butterfly was, indeed, quite male. It had just been fluttering around carelessly and didn't seem to have anything to do with the passionflower despite the fact that it is its caterpillars' host plant. Instead, it had clearly must have been patrolling the vine for newly emerged females, a behavior that is typical in Heliconians (Heliconius). In fact, the males of some species are even known to break open the female's chrysalis right before she is going to emerge just to steal the chance to mate with her!

After catching the male, we weren't able to find any other Gulf Fritillaries or any other butterflies flying around at all. But, to make things a little better, we did end up catching five Gulf Fritillary caterpillars and four Mediterranean Katydids. Next time we are definitely going to come a bit earlier when the butterflies are more likely to be out. Albany Hill, here we come!

- Brian