Blitz catalogs Schoodic butterfly population

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK – A group of about 40 amateur and professional naturalists spent the weekend hunting butterflies around the Schoodic Peninsula area of Acadia National Park in an effort to catalog different species.

The effort, advertised as the first Maine Lepidoptera Blitz, was sponsored jointly by the National Park Service and the Maine Entomological Society with help from the Maine Forest Service. A blitz, according to Dick Dearborn of the MES, sets very tight parameters for the collection of a species.

“In this case, we focused on lepidoptera – butterflies and moths – in a specific location and for a strict time frame,” Dearborn said.

The group started collecting at 3 p.m. Saturday, and by 3 p.m. Sunday they had collected 145 species of moths and 18 species of butterflies.

They ranged from a small common blue butterfly – called a cherry gall azure – to a fuzzy brown moth with bright pink splotches on its wings.

Some of the hunters found the insects still in the caterpillar stage, and one located a cocoon of a Columbia silk moth, both valid ways of showing that the species is living in the area.

Most of the species were common varieties, but there was one moth – a Noctuidae, or owlet-type moth (one that flies at night) – that none of the experts could identify.

“There’s one moth we found and we just don’t know what it is,” said Reggie Webster, an independent entomologist from Fredericton, New Brunswick, who with Brian Scholtens, an entomologist with the College of Charleston in South Carolina, did the taxonomy – identification of the species that were collected.

Several participants stressed that the blitz does not provide a full assessment of the butterflies and moths that live in the Schoodic area of the park, noting that a visit several weeks from now would garner a different and likely wider variety of the flying insects.

The blitz is a good way to gather a great deal of information at one time, much more than a single researcher could do on his or her own, Scholtens said.

“With all these people, we can cover all these areas and get a look at the entire Schoodic Peninsula area of the park,” he said. “It gives us a very good snapshot of all the species that are flying at this time.”

The blitz targeted 19 sites around the peninsula, with the volunteers using collection methods ranging from the tried-and-true butterfly net to electric insect traps and even a secret “brew” – an aged potion containing beer, sugar, rum and bananas – that was painted on trees to attract the butterflies and moths.

Each species collected was cataloged and added to a database that not only identifies the insect but also includes when and where it was found. The blitz targeted a number of different habitats, garnering different species from different sites.

According to David Manski, chief of resource management at the park, that kind of information is essential to developing a good management plan for the park.

“The National Park Service is charged with protecting the resource in Acadia,” Manski said. “How can we do it effectively if we don’t have a good understanding of what we’re charged with protecting? This can serve as a benchmark for us to tell what’s happening around us.”

Although the park has in its museum a comprehensive survey of insects done in the early half of the 20th century, the blitz data will provide a new baseline by which the park can monitor changes that take place, Manski said.

The information gathered this weekend, including samples of each species collected, will be compiled in a database and be made available to researchers and the park museum, he said.

This likely will not be the last insect blitz in the park. MES worked with the park last year on a study of ants in the Mount Desert Island section.

Manski said he would like to see more of this type of survey work done at the park, not only on butterflies and moths, but also on other flora and fauna.

Although regular visitors to the park cannot collect anything from within the boundaries, Manski said the park service considers this type of effort beneficial and, with the new Schoodic Education and Research Center at the former Navy base property, the park now has a facility that can support this type of coordinated scientific research.