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Comeback Caterpillar

A rare creature quietly returns to Key Biscayne

By Tamara Lush 

On a recent weekday, Samuel Wright plowed through the scrubby bushes at Crandon Park, passing the stinging nettle, stepping over a prickly pear cactus, and carefully avoiding a poisonwood tree with shiny brown leaves. He wore a white T-shirt printed with a road race logo, tan cargo pants, and a light brown hat. He looked like he was on safari. Though it was midday and the sun was at its brightest, Wright didn’t sweat much — just a little bit around his wire-rim glasses. As a Fairchild Tropical Garden biologist who specializes in restoration of endangered beach habitats, he was well acquainted with the oppressive stickiness of Key Biscayne. Wright abruptly stopped walking when he reached a small, sandy clearing in the brush. He bent down to examine a plant that resembled a cross between a fern and a weed. "Here's one," he said, pointing at a coontie plant (which is much more fun to say than its Latin version: Zamia integrifolia). "Oh, look," Wright said. "It's got some larvae on it."

A half-dozen tiny caterpillars lazed atop the thin green fronds. They looked like little red blobs with yellow spots. In a steady voice nearly drowned out by the wind rustling nearby sabal palms, Wright explained that within a few days, the blobs would produce a subtropical miracle: the atala butterfly. With its velvety black wings, turquoise blue spots, and tiny red body, the atala was until recently all but an afterthought on Key Biscayne -- and throughout Florida. The butterfly was so near extinction that it wasn't even recorded on the federal endangered species list. By 1965, it was believed to have disappeared from the wild altogether.

Says Wright: "It really is one of the few feel-good comeback stories in nature."

The 36-year-old biologist grew up in New Jersey, far from the subtropics. As a boy, he collected snakes, frogs, and turtles; at the University of Florida, he majored in wildlife ecology and helped restore underwater vegetation by planting 2000 sprigs of grass in the Rainbow River near Gainesville. In college he at first thought it would be sexy to work with endangered animals like cougars or seals. But then he realized the animals' habitats were also endangered -- so he changed his focus to rare plants.

Wright has spent the past six years on Key Biscayne counting and cataloging the federally endangered beach cluster vine, a wispy green plant with little white flowers. He has become an expert on the inland areas of Crandon and Bill Baggs parks -- the vast wilderness off the nature trails. He can easily spot marsh rabbits, which he classifies as "kind of cool, even though they eat my beach vines." He has seen three-foot-long iguanas and has stumbled upon amorous couples in various stages of undress.

Because he is intimately familiar with the plants and insects at Crandon Park, his Fairchild bosses earlier this year asked him to assemble an atala presentation for a July 29 butterfly gardening symposium. Though Wright has a butterfly garden at his Dadeland condo, he didn't anticipate that he would be delving into something of a mystery when he agreed to research how the atala has returned, like Lazarus, to Key Biscayne.

"Sam is so knowledgeable about Key Biscayne," said Suzanne Koptur, a biology professor at the University of Miami, who knows Wright through her own research on the atala. She adds that his talk during Fairchild's "Butterfly Days" should inspire others to plant local greenery. "We need to keep planting native plants," she said. "Otherwise everything associated with the plants, like the atala, will be gone."

To be able to talk about the tiny atala, which grows to be about the size of a quarter, Wright had to learn about the coontie plant. The butterfly eats this foliage during its caterpillar stage. Although its leaves are poisonous to most other insects and animals, the atala gobbles them up. The toxins are insurance against bird attacks, Wright explains. "The word for that is aposematic; the caterpillars are toxic to predators as well because they eat the plant."

For hundreds of years, the plant grew wild and served a purpose for the natives -- Seminole Indians ground the coontie's nubby brown root into starch for flour. When Europeans drove the Indians into the Everglades in the mid-Nineteenth Century, they took over harvesting of the coontie, so much so that it became one of pioneer Dade County's biggest industries. The plant became extremely rare in the wild.

Then it got worse for the coontie and its butterfly accompaniment. The plants preferred the sandy, higher ground of the so-called "beach strand'' on barrier islands -- which happened to be the best location for houses and condo buildings. As the plants were uprooted, so was the atala. By the mid-1960s, both had nearly died out.

In 1992, some 30 years after the last atala was spotted on Key Biscayne, Hurricane Andrew buzz-sawed Bill Baggs' Australian pines and other foliage. In the years that followed, park biologists planted greenery around the park. Not the pines, because they weren't native, but other wild things such as sabal palms and ficus.

They also planted the coontie; they received young plants from university labs and tropical gardens, where they had been cultivated in greenhouses. Elizabeth Golden, who has been the Bill Baggs park biologist since 1994, said only a couple dozen of the rare plants were planted. "We were trying to find coontie grown in South Florida because we were trying to be biologically correct," she said. "It wasn't easy."

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