The Search for the Quino Checkerspot

It is one of Southern California’s great environmental mysteries. An orange-and-black butterfly, once so commonplace as to be ignored by collectors, is now on the verge of disappearing.

No one knows why the Quino checkerspot is becoming extinct, or how to save it.

Tougher still is how and where to track it down. Unlike such rarities as the Northern spotted owl and California gnatcatcher, which are difficult enough to locate, Quinos are believed to spend most of the year as tiny, dormant caterpillars hidden under rocks and in crevices.

And with all these riddles unanswered, some experts suspect that within a decade or sooner, the Quino may vanish.

“I do not believe we’re going to save this butterfly,” said Dennis Murphy, a well-known expert in conservation biology, who contends the Quino is “at as great a risk of extinction as any individual species in the country.”

Federal entomologist Chris Nagano sums up the Quino’s plight this way: “Four engines out and about 10 seconds to impact.”

The Quino once flourished in a huge swath from the Santa Monica Mountains south into Baja and eastward to the desert. It seems to have already vanished from Los Angeles and Orange counties.

As it nose dives, the butterfly threatens to spark a new fracas over the Endangered Species Act in regions such as southern San Diego County and southwest Riverside County, last bastions of the butterfly and also areas of home construction. Other developers in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties conducted surveys this spring to make sure they did not have the Quino in their midst.

Some believe the butterfly may mean worse headaches for conservationists and builders than the Stephens kangaroo rat, which triggered a now-legendary battle over property rights and species protection.

After all, you can spot a rat or a gnatcatcher, but what about a 2-inch butterfly that sprouts wings and flies for only about a week each year? Whose larvae can stay dormant for years at a time?

How do developers deal with a species they can’t even see?

“There’s going to be millions of dollars lost to various landowners, as a result of the Quino checkerspot,” estimated Brice Kittle, vice president of Van Daele Development Corp., which is building homes in Riverside County and surrounding areas.

The Quino has the potential in areas where it lives, he said, “of slowing down the ability to deliver housing, or buildings, anything that’s affected by the grading of ungraded property.”

Others suspect the Quino’s ranks have shrunk so severely that its economic impact will be slight compared to the gnatcatcher and kangaroo rat. And some hope that landmark nature preserves being crafted across the region with the blessing of the Clinton and Wilson administrations will give the Quino one last stab at life.

Still others believe the fight may have been lost years ago, with the federal government’s nine-year delay in adding the Quino to the endangered species list, coupled with continued growth in the Los Angeles area.

“It’s an exercise in blown opportunities,” said Murphy, who began working in 1988 to win federal protection for the butterfly and succeeded only last year.

“We’re going to cause economic displacement, but with no hope of conservation victory,” Murphy said. “It’s a bummer.”

10 Species on Endangered List

The Quino is not the only California butterfly in trouble.

Of the 16 varieties on the federal endangered species list, 10 live in California, where homes and freeways have supplanted the unique mixture of plants that they crave.

Many rare California butterflies confine themselves to small geographic areas, such as the dunes near Los Angeles International Airport favored by the El Segundo blue butterfly. Its distant cousin, the endangered Palos Verdes blue, disappeared from the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the early 1980s, only to reemerge in 1994 in nearby San Pedro.

But the Quino’s sweeping historic range makes it an enigma for scientists astonished at how such a common butterfly occupying such a wide area could plummet to endangered status in so short a time.

“We call it the passenger pigeon butterfly,” butterfly expert Rudi Mattoni said. “This is an animal that lived here by the multiple millions, was typical of the area, and is now on the verge of extinction. . . .

“It’s different than all the other butterfly extinctions we’ve faced.”

In its heyday, the Quino is said to have formed clouds of wings over ridge lines and pools. It reportedly flew through the streets of downtown San Diego in a year of booming population numbers in the late 1970s. It once flourished at Point Dume.

Some remember when they were so numerous in the Otay Mesa area near the Mexican border that motorists found them splayed on their windshields as winged road kill.

Orange County lay at the heart of its territory. In a handwritten 1989 letter in federal records, Orange County native John W. Johnson describes his 60 years of tracking the Quino, starting in 1933 and 1934 in what is now Irvine Regional Park. He reports long-gone colonies in Upper Laguna Canyon, Black Star Ranch and Dana Point. The Quino was last officially reported in the county in Black Star Canyon in 1967.

“The only means of preventing total extinction,” Johnson wrote in 1989, “is the acquisition of colony sites with enough buffer lands surrounding them. These sites should be fenced and closed to all disturbance, including human access.”

But the free fall continued. Today, the nation’s Quino population seems restricted to a few areas in Riverside and San Diego counties.

“Somewhere in the bigger picture, something has gone awry,” said Dan Silver of the Los Angeles-based Endangered Habitats League.

Scientists can reel off the key causes for its disappearance: suburbanization, agriculture, the invasion of nonnative grasses that squeezed out the plants that nourish Quino larvae. But some are perplexed why the butterfly seems to have disappeared from areas rich with those plants.

“Quino is going a lot faster than its habitat is going, which has us concerned,” said Gordon Pratt of UC Riverside, who is surveying the butterfly’s range for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Take the enigma of the disappearing Quino colonies in Riverside County’s Gavilan Hills. There in the early 1980s, Mattoni and two colleagues could swing their nets and fill them with Quinos, catching 100 in less than an hour. But the butterfly disappeared by the late 1980s, confounding scientists who still found the plants they feed on growing there.

“It’s not like a wholesale destruction of the habitat. Yet, something has happened,” said Greg Ballmer, a UC Riverside entomologist and agricultural researcher. He wonders if nonnative insects called earwigs could be eating the larvae, or if nearby horses and motorbikes were squashing them.

Just a few months ago, a researcher found a handful of Quino larvae in the Gavilan Hills, 12 years after they disappeared.

There are no easy answers to the riddle, scientists say.

The Quino and related butterflies received a burst of national attention when one researcher reported a possible link between the butterfly’s flagging numbers and global warming. But several experts are skeptical, saying that while a warming climate may be worsening the Quino’s plight, its disappearance is caused primarily by more direct impacts of man.

It could well be victim to a host of threats, some say.

Said Mattoni: “The Quino, more than anything else, is an indicator of the widespread deterioration of the world of diversity.”

Economic Recovery Poses Greater Threat

Now new pressures face the Quino. Southern California’s economic recovery means that people hope to build on some of the same land where the butterfly is clinging to life.

Those spots include southwest Riverside County, where federal officials are probing three alleged cases in which landowners may have intentionally destroyed Quino habitat.

Some landowners fear a regulatory tug-of-war as vicious as that triggered by the infamous Stephens kangaroo rat.

“These species are being looked at as unwelcome as toxic waste on your land,” said Dennis Hollingsworth of Murietta, whose consulting firm assists landowners with endangered species issues.

It’s worse than termites, he said. “Termites, you can get an exterminator.”

He calls the Quino a microcosm of problems with the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which he says made the butterfly a liability for property owners instead of an asset. A landowner with land containing butterflies might well decide to “go to the hardware store and buy Roundup.” While the Fish and Wildlife Service is still studying where the Quino can be found, some developers think that work should have come before the endangered species listing.

“In the interim, they’ve created havoc, chaos, they’ve damaged land values,” said Gary Hillman of Realty Executives in the Lake Mathews area

Last fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began issuing guidelines for dealing with Quino throughout Southern California. A map of high and low butterfly concentrations should be ready by autumn, to be used in designing a recovery plan.

But even those charged with protecting the Quino acknowledge the problems ahead. To save the butterfly, said Nagano, “is going to take truly extraordinary measures by everyone.”

The term “extraordinary measures” summons up thoughts of life support and some wonder whether a single butterfly merits the entomological cavalry.

Murphy, who fought to list the species, wrestles with the notion of triage. Would the money to be spent on the Quino fight be better reserved for, say, the gnatcatcher, which has a better chance of survival? “I’ve got two tensions I deal with,” he said. “The side of me that says we have to try to save everything, . . . the other side of me that says the job is so overwhelming, let us please sit down and prioritize.”

Nagano of the local Fish and Wildlife office pauses when considering the options.

“Society is known by the laws that it has, and the United States has the Endangered Species Act, and that says, we value life,” he said.

“I think it is worth saving, just because it is.”

Seeking Out Quino Habitat

Dead Quinos can be found in museums throughout the United States, their bodies pinned neatly in place, the pumpkin-and-black wings spread out under glass.

But to see a live Quino is a lot more difficult.

It requires driving, hiking, standing still and staring at grasses, soil, the horizon for hours on end.

One cool April morning, Nagano and other biologists headed for the Marron Valley, a reserve so far south in San Diego County that the green hills of Mexico lay just across the river.

There, against a vista dotted with wildflowers, the team searched for Quino. This valley remains one of the most pristine spots in Southern California, so if the butterfly is going to be anywhere, it should be here.

Pratt, the UC Riverside researcher, knelt next to tiny plants the Quino like, searching for larvae and marking the spots with fluorescent pink flags.

But no Quino butterflies could be seen. Maybe the day was too cool, too overcast. Maybe the flight season had passed.

The troupe drove farther uphill past a cluster of Border Patrol vans, amid steep green slopes that looked more like Vermont than Southern California. They found fields tinged with the rich magenta of owl’s clover, but still no Quino.

So they stood like sentries on the ridge line, two-way radios in hand. They waited. Then biologist Eric Hein called out.

Quino!

“Quino,” someone else yelled into a radio.

“We’ve got Quino!” Nagano announced across the hills.

The butterfly fluttered downward, lighting on an orangish piece of earth that perfectly matched its wings. It lay there, motionless, perhaps trying to soak in some sun. This might be the last butterfly of the season, one biologist said.

They searched for five hours that day, but never found another Quino.

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Quino Checkerspot’s Life Cycle

The butterfly lives about a week, after taking 40 weeks or longer to mature

Two weeks after being laid, pin-head-sized eggs hatch

Then ant-sized caterpillars live above ground for 3-6 weeks.

They go underground or under rocks and hibernate for at least 26 weeks, but sometimes for more than a year during dry periods.

During the next rainy season (fall/winter), the 1 1/2-inch caterpillars emerge and feed for two to three weeks.

They then pupate for 2 weeks..

Butterfly emerges and lives about 1 week.

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Caterpillars feed on only three types of plants: Plantago, Owl’s clover or Chinese Houses.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service