Butterfly... get lost

[Jonna]

I know, it's scandalous. I'm really sick of these butterfly's laying their eggs all over my new passion vines.  I mean, you get a pretty flying bug for a few days but you get these voracious, creepy slug like mouths for weeks that eat everything in sight.

I've been picking the small yellow eggs off daily, squashing the striped worms, turning the hose on the butterfly whenever I see one heading for the vines and still there isn't a whole leaf on either of them.  I've been using systemic food, rose food, but that hasn't done anything.  I'm about ready to spray although I still feel kind of mean about it.  I bought the spray, I just haven't used it yet. 

Please tell me this is a short lived season and they will go away soon. 

[Athens_Ponder]

So in one garden forum, you have people planting passion vines for the specific butterflies they attract and another garden forum has people that just want to kill them. 

We  have so SCREWED up this land, so reduced the wildlife and the habitats they depend on, we have replaced woods with grassy deserts, we have destroyed BEAUTIFUL cypress swamps to provide mulch for people's azaleas, we have drained other swamps and filled them in for more houses with sterile backyards.  It is really sad.  Many people are creating wildlife gardens to help give a little back to the nature that sustains us all.  It really saddens me when I hear about people that can't live with a little loss (less passion vine leaves for a few weeks/months) in the interest of helping out our NATIVE wildlife.   

BTW, the leaves will come back.  Caterpillers (typically) will not kill the plant that sustains it. 

[Julles]

For some years, I had the native Texas passion vine - which has a slightly less bizaar shaped-flower, but it's more pretty, in a subdues way - and it was just about always leafless.  As said above, though, it's still alive, and the leaves will come back.  Oh, and I hardly ever saw the adult titterlingua butterfly, or whatever it's called. 

and right now, my parrot feather has been eaten to nothing, and several other plants are leafless.  I guess it goes with the territory - GARDENING territory, that is.   

[Johns]

Well, I guess it takes all kinds...there are surely some people out there who wouldn't kill a tomato hornworm stripping their tomato plants simply because they like Sphinx moths (I actually know a lady that grows a tomato plant for them, and not for the tomatoes--Her 7 year old son who died of brain cancer last year loved butterflies and moths).  One man's meat is another's poison and I doubt Jonna is going to seriously decimated the butterfly population by mashing a few eggs.  Jonna, use Thuricide on your passion vines..it is a NATURAL effective deterrent to caterpillars eating your plants (It kills them).

Athens, you have every right to express your opinion, but it would be nice not to be quite so blunt about it.  And by the way, while I agree we should and could be better fiduciaries of our inherited environment, the earth does not care what we do; a super volcano will likely erase humanity one day, just as all life on earth has been erased many times in the past.  And then it will start all over again, and again, and again...

[joeyb5980]

Athens, you have every right to express your opinion, but it would be nice not to be quite so blunt about it. 

I completely agree with Johns here, especially this post being only your 3rd post on the forum... It doesn't make a very good first impression    Everyone has an opinion, but we encourage politeness around here 

[Mikey]

A friend has a volunteer passion vine that came up through a crack in her patio.  She thought it a weed and routinely would try pulling it out.  The ironic thing is that she wanted to attract butterflies to her garden.  I told her that the "weed" she kept trying to kill was actually a passion vine and if she let it grow up the patio support where it was already growing she would soon have butterflies.  "Naw" she said.  "Yeah" I said.  Soon she was all excited when she saw the Fritillaries flying about laying their eggs on the plant.  Then she got frustrated when she noticed her naked vine.  She now "thins" her crop of caterpillars so the vine isn't nekid

Jonna: I too got chastised over on the GardenWeb not too long ago by a native plant policeman for planting non-native milkweed for the Monarch butterflies.  I, as is my nature, had fun with her by making some humorous sarcastic comments of which she of  course could not see the humor.

I obviously haven't walked in A-P's shoes and I assume he has sound reasons for his passionate thoughts but in my neck of the woods I have actually seen many habitat improvements.  In the 70's I seldom saw pelicans flying along the beach.  Brown pelicans are now plentiful.  In the 70's the ocean water where I fished was murky, lacked kelp, lacked certain game fish.  Now the water is clear, the kelp is a nuisance and the game fish have returned.  I have further examples but I won't belabor the point.

[Athens_Ponder]

I really didn't think I was being that impolite.  I only expressed my sadness.  Sorry it came off like it did.

The whole environmental debate can get somewhat distorted.  I know the earth will go on regardless.  It really comes down to human desires (aka politics).   I would personally prefer to live in a world with all of the species I have come to love and appreciate.  Many others live so remote from the natural world that they simply don't care, and if a species goes extinct or a habitat is destroyed they simply don't feel any sadness.  They will be perfectly fine with whatever makes it through this current extinction event.  Of course one person's killing of caterpillars will not matter one bit in the grand scheme of things.   I guess I just wanted to make a point that we (as gardeners) can make a difference in our own worlds.

I'll stop now, as I know we have ventured off-topic.  I just wanted to clarify my intentions. 

P.S. I, too, rejoice over the return of the brown pelican, bald eagle, peregrine falcon, osprey and many others.  Too ofter the environmental community can't enjoy it's successes (and the ones mentioned above were almost entirely due to the banning off DDT and other organophosphate/organochlorine pesticides).  But, daily I see habitat losses in my county, and while we can't stop farmers from desiring to maximize their profit through subdivision and development, we can try to do our own little bit in our own yards.

[mascot]

This is just an observation and not intended to be directed at you, A-P, or anyone else, but I find it all rather humorous that some people are passionate about the pretty and gentle creatures of our world...but would squash a black widow underfoot or decimate a hornet's nest that was too close to our homes without batting an eye.  Who wouldn't do all they can to remove a rattlesnake that, in it's own slithery mind, was there first because it's his habitat that was taken over by home builders?

How many people will rip out poison ivy or sumac in a heartbeat, yet shun a neighbor who pulled out a bed of beautiful roses?

As for me, so as not to give the wrong impression, I have killed every single black widow spider I could get to, yet the ants crawling around on my front porch plants and on the hill behind me don't bother me in the least.  Should they venture inside...I have a friend in pest control on a 12-pack retainer just waiting to dust them.  I have found a snake that was somewhat harmless but could eventually eat my fish, so I relocated him to an area where he would be more suited, yet some stupid little froggie/toad was louder than the crickets combined so I let him sing a duet a-cappella with the bottom side of my shoe.

When I was a kid I threw a rock into a bunch of birds, as many kids have done, except I missed the open space and connected with a bird's head...and 34 years later I still feel bad about it. But now have one of the most incredible, affectionate birds you could ever imagine as a pet.  (I never told him I rock-beaned a bird when I was 12....so ... shhhhh!!)

I think the thing we all have to learn and realize is kinda what Mikey said: one man's meat is another man's poison, and that being said....we are all part of this entire ecosystem we call planet Earth, and the good and the bad, with a few exceptions, help to balance it out.

Well, that's my two "sense", for what it's worth...

and to end this on a positive note...here's the view outside my office:


        "I can't complain (but sometimes I still do)"
                                                        -Joe Walsh

[miguynmkoi]

Love your office view Blind Too 

My passion vine story:
The first year I planted my passion vine in the spring and it grew beautifully covering the posts and rails I intended it to cover.  Early summer I notice lots of multi-colored butterflies fluttering around the vine.  I thought "lucky me to have butterflies circling my yard."  Then maybe a couple of weeks later I found ugly green caterpillars eat all the leaves on the vine.  I looked up the caterpillar ID online and I matched them to an ugly "plain" moth.  I picked off as many as I could find and fed them to the fishies.  Later on I found out some of these surviving cats became beautiful orange butterflies fluttering about.  I totally mis-ID'd them.  I felt bad about this mistake and always think about it when I look at my vines.  Unfortunately they never returned either.  :'(

No lesson here just a sad story.

[Julles]

The computer froze up and ate what I had written a coupla hours ago.  But:

1.  Let's remember that via Internet, we can't see the person's facial expressions or body language, and it's easy to misinterpret what the tone of the message is.  So, compose your message thoughtfully, and read with an open mind.

2.  I know a guy, a tree-huggin', earth-lovin', vegetarian, chemical-free, low-impact-on-the-land type of guy, who, when there's a cockroach in the house, will corner the bug and capture it in his hand, and then carefully remove it to the outdoors, where it can roam free. 

[Jonna]

Well, I'm not too sure that these butterflies are native to this area.  I'm near Palm Springs in the California desert, if it weren't for man coming here with water and grass and tropical plants it would be only desert creatures that live here.  That said, I am rather ambivalent about the insect world. I know that most of them are necessary but I'm not excited about being up close and personal with them.  Some though, I'd eradicate without a thought.  I've often dreamed I could send all mosquitoes and spiders to mars, just suck them all up and away. 

Mostly I go by my rule that if they stay outside in their own area they can live, if they come inside into my area, they die.  That's why I still haven't sprayed the passion flower, the butterfly really is outside in its world so I can't quite bring myself to kill it.  The larvae though, squish!

As for only planting native plants, I am pretty disgusted with most of the rabid advocates of that.  They took a beautiful grass field on the Bay in San Francisco, used by tons of city residents to walk, run, exercise their dogs, do tai chi, a million uses to the citizens of an urban area.  It was busy every day of the year, it gave everyone in the city, rich or poor, a chance to enjoy the beauty of the Bay.  Under the mantra of returning it to its natural state, they turned it into a swamp that may be natural but that no one can use.  In an urban area, I think the needs of the humans outweigh the urge to return things to what they were.  It also pisses me off to watch them go through and cut down beautiful shade trees in parks because they are not natural to the area.  I think they are obsessive people with more concern for being right than for the world around them.

[karen J]

I think they are obsessive people with more concern for being right than for the world around them.

   I think I agree with you. Most of the time, "human interference" does more harm than good, all to satisfy the "I feel good because I'm helping the enviornment" egoist mentality. Planting Kudzu to control erosion, shooting starlings, eradicating Queen Anne's Lace, introducing beetles to control Purple Loosestrife, putting countless species on the endangered/protected list  (Canadian Goose stew!).... etc. Nobody knows what the long-term implications of such actions are, and they have already proven to be detrimental in many cases. Maybe these things are supposed to be happening and don't need any Human intervention. But it's perfectly OK to grow ruminant cattle on feed lots to feed the masses... who needs grass anyway? Feed 'em corn! (PS, not referring to lawn grass here! Kill it all and plant real grass).
   We sometimes don't realize how much we rely on the sun, and nobody seems to know how the food chain works anymore (or where we get our food from for that matter). It's bizzarre, and I personally place much of the blame on the enviornmentalist media and the USDA. We need boneless, skinless chicken breasts... ? Is that what homo sapiens are supposed to eat? Is that what we've been eating for 2.5 million years? 

Uuuugh! Gaaaa! Sorry for the rant! 

Jonna, squishing butterfly larva will not mean anything. Just don't stray off the path and squish any butterflies. 

[Julles]

And how about not using our own land here to grow enough food here for ourselves (actually, we export much of our harvest) and importing food from other countries, which have less strict regulations re pesticides and harmones, etc. and also have brought in foreign insects, like the bees killing our own bees and reducing the pollination of our crops.   And like all the gunck coming from China - tainted pet food, tainted seafood, tires that were made correctly for a while and then they went and left out one of the layers so the tires failed, etc.  There have been many incidences.