Staff at the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo have achieved a rare feat involving an even rarer insect. In early July, officials said a rare Alberta butterfly, the curiously isolated hairstreak, completed its life cycle from egg to adult, entirely under human care. “This is an exciting milestone for our team and for the species,” said Dr. James Glasier, conservation population ecologist at the Wilder Institute, in a news release. “It gives us information we’ve never had before, and for a species this specialized and this isolated, that knowledge is critical to shaping how we approach our work.” The critically endangered butterfly is found only in Blakiston Fan, a 300-hectare plot of land in Waterton Lakes National Park and was long believed to be related to the widespread half-moon hairstreak. However, researchers learned that since the curiously isolated hairstreak butterfly was cut off from other populations for approximately 40,000 years, it’s classified as its own species. “It depends entirely on one host plant, the silvery lupine, and has a mutually beneficial relationship with a single ant species, Lasius ponderosae. Adults live just six to 16 days, feeding on wildflowers and searching for mates,” staff said. “With its entire population confined to one small area and no fallback population, a single wildfire, drought, or invasive weed outbreak could push the species closer to extinction.” In addition to the adult butterfly, at least eight eggs, along with their host plants, have been collected and brought to the Wilder Institute’s Calgary Zoo for protection over the winter. Officials say the lessons learned from the successful hatching will be applied to refine the techniques to support those eggs. “The exciting milestone provides new information that could help determine whether a population of curiously isolated hairstreaks, and potentially a conservation breeding program, could be established under human care, creating a potential safeguard for a species found in only one small area of Alberta.”
