An Obsession With Butterflies

THE EL SEGUNDO BLUE SPENDS MOST OF ITS life on the minute flower heads of coast buckwheat. From mid-June to mid-August, the female lays fifteen to twenty eggs a day, which hatch in five to seven days. The larvae are highly, remarkably varied, from pure white to dull yellow, from red to maroon, patterned in yellow or white dashes and chevrons. The caterpillars feed on and hide in the tiny petals, stamens, stigma, seeds, and leaves of their host plant. In their third instar, they develop honey glands and are tended by ants, who protect them from parasitic wasps and other predators. A single caterpillar will eat two or three flower heads in eighteen to twenty-five days before it crawls or drops to the ground, burrows two inches deep into the debris of its home buckwheat, and pupates through the fall and winter.

The adult El Segundo Blue emerges when the coast buckwheat is flowering again. The butterfly has the radius of a dime. The male’s upper wings are a shimmery, silvery blue with black-and-orange borders edged in white. The female’s upper wings are brown with an orange border. The female flies immediately to a flower head to await a patrolling male who finds and mates with her in a matter of hours, punctual as a well-run bus. In the wild, she will live from two to seven days, nectaring continuously, egg laying continuously, and trying to avoid the lynx and crab spiders that live in one out of two hundred flower heads. In a laboratory, raised with tenderness by scientist Rudi Mattoni, she would live an average of sixteen days.

The female blue shares her flower heads with a hairstreak butterfly, the Acmon Blue butterfly, and at least eight moth species. All these larvae are sometimes cannibalistic. They compete for food, and they harbor the parasitoids that never rest but breed and move year-round from host to host.

Other beetles, flies, crickets, weevils, and gnats tend to their own business with the coast buckwheat; the plant, in turn, has a profound relationship with the soil and shifting sand, as well as subtle ties, good and bad, to neighboring primrose, deerweed, sunflower, lupine, and bladderpod, which together support lizards, toads, mice, shrews, foxes, and owls.

No one can say how long this has been going on, this being the intimate, familial life of the El Segundo Blue and the coast buckwheat with their multiple forms of kinship and strife. But one could guess that the cycle has lasted for thousands of years, repeating like a beloved soap opera on an eight-mile stretch of the El Segundo dune system in glamorous southern California.

In the fifteenth century, as they walked the shoreline looking for food, Native Americans brushed their hands over coast buckwheat and startled up small blue wings. After the Spanish conquered these tribes, conquistadors and priests stood on the dunes; and then, after the Mexican Revolution, independent mestizos; and then, after the United States won its war with Mexico, American settlers—a parade of human beings always conquering and being conquered, always feeding from the land.

By the 1880s, ranchers had long grazed cattle, horses, and sheep on the coastal prairie east of the dunes, and farmers were replacing native vegetation with beans and corn. The small communities of Redondo Beach and Venice crept up onto the sand itself. In 1911, an oil company built a refinery above the beach.

In 1927, Rudi Mattoni was born in Venice, California. He spent most of his childhood a few miles north in Beverly Hills, where he became a “boy collector,” much like Richard Vane-Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, and countless

El Segundo Blue

others. It was a sport not so different from the rural tradition of hunting and fishing: finding and catching and owning something beautiful. At that time, butterflies were still abundant in Los Angeles, and from his bedroom window, Rudi could lean out and collect six different species from one bush.

In 1927, too, a plane piloted by Charles Lindbergh and humorist Will Rogers landed on a dirt runway east of the El Segundo dunes. The site was eventually chosen as the city’s new airport.

The 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression slowed the development of the dunes until after World War II, when there was an explosion of workers who needed housing.

By the 1950s, a subdivision covered much of the El Segundo Blue habitat, right under the flight path of jet planes leaving an increasingly busy LAX airport. Residents complained about the noise. The Federal Aviation Authority worried about public safety. Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles was buying up much of the surrounding land.

In 1957, Rudi Mattoni earned his Ph.D. in zoology and genetics from the University of California at Los Angeles. He went to work determining the effects of the first atomic bomb explosion on insect populations in New Mexico. He would later do research for the U.S. space program, looking at the microecology of long flights: the genetics and population dynamics of bacteria in hypogravity and irradiation. He would also teach, study the Sonora Blue butterfly, develop new methods in the commercial farming of mushrooms, standardize protocols for hundreds of tests on agricultural products, and help produce 3 million sterilized cotton pink bollworms for biological control of that pest.

In 1965, a dispute between policemen and an African American community precipitated the Watts riot in South Central Los Angeles; thirty-four died and more than 1,000 were injured. Parts of the city burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt.

From 1966 to 1972, the conflict between residents on the El Segundo dunes and the LAX airport was resolved. Over eight hundred houses were purchased or condemned and then bulldozed.

In 1971, Arthur Bonner was born, the third of five children. His family would soon move from rural Florida to South Central Los Angeles, where two rival African American street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, were at the height of a turf war.

In 1973, the president of the United States signed into law the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the world’s only legal prohibition against the extinction of other species, even those as small and localized as the El Segundo Blue butterfly.

In 1975, to realign a major highway, a large area of the remaining El Segundo dunes was excavated, recontoured, and stabilized with native seed. Unfortunately, the seeds were native to a coastal sage, not a dune scrub plant community. The revegetation effort introduced the highly successful common buckwheat, which is toxic to the larvae of the El Segundo Blue. Moreover, the common buckwheat blooms a month earlier than coast buckwheat, providing food for the blue’s competitors. These two butterfly and eight moth species can produce multiple generations in a year. More butterflies and more moths also meant more parasitoids.

Also in 1975, thanks to members of the conservation group, the Xerxes Society, Standard Oil Company agreed to fence off and manage their small portion of the El Segundo Blue habitat. This was the first formal butterfly reserve in California.

In 1976, the El Segundo Blue was listed as protected under the Endangered Species Act. In the early 1980s, the butterfly had a population of about 1,500 on the one-and-two-thirds-acre site at the oil refinery, and of about 400 on patches of scrub dune vegetation on the three hundred acres south of the LAX airport, land that still contained the rubble of the condemned subdivision. Under the ESA, these acres were proposed as critical habitat for the blue.

In 1983, the golf-course proposal was submitted by the Los Angeles City Planning Department to the Coastal Commission, the organization overseeing development on California’s shoreline. By now, there had been eight public hearings with all sides vocally represented, some for full development of the remaining dunes, some for partial development, some for zero development.

As one chronicler noted, the El Segundo Blue “became a convenient rallying point.” The butterfly was a marker of spiritual growth. The butterfly was one of multiple tests to determine whether human beings would survive and deserved to survive our unthinking, rapacious, relentless desires. The butterfly stood for humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

In 1983, Rudi Mattoni and others declared a nearby species, the Palos Verdes Blue, officially extinct. Its habitat was twelve miles from the El Segundo dunes. For the last few years, Rudi had been counting the number of Palos Verdes adults he could find on two hands: six, four, seven, zero.

In 1985, the Coastal Commission rejected the plan promoted by airport officials for a twenty-seven-hole golf course with eighty acres set aside as a preserve for the El Segundo Blue. Instead, the airport was directed to protect and study the butterfly, starting immediately. The Board of Airport Commissioners gave Rudi Mattoni a small grant to stabilize the population and to begin a biological survey of the three-hundred-acre area.

That study would identify eleven new plant and animal species unique to the dunes and threatened by competition with non-native species. These included the El Segundo Giant Flower-loving Fly, the San Diego Horned Lizard, the El Segundo Spineflower, and the El Segundo Jerusalem Cricket.

“Bad News for Golfers” ran a local headline when Rudi went public with his conclusion that the site was not only a major habitat of the endangered El Segundo Blue but its only habitat, as well as being a “hotspot of diversity” for other species.

In 1989, a major restoration project began on the El Segundo dunes, powered by volunteers from a local conservation group, Rhapsody in Green. Every third Sunday, men and women from around Los Angeles came with trash bags, gloves, and earplugs; they dug up introduced and invading plants such as ripgut, iceplant, acacia, and common buckwheat, and replaced them with the El Segundo Blue’s host plant, the coast buckwheat. On some days, Rudi could be seen directing them, wearing a pith helmet.

In 1991, the Los Angeles City Council voted that two hundred acres of the dune system be permanently preserved. Rudi was given $430,000 in state highway mitigation funds to direct the restoration effort.

In 1993, Arthur Bonner was released from jail. He had already decided that staying out of trouble and being a good father were his new priorities. His brother suggested he join the Los Angeles Conservation Corp, which paid inner-city youth minimum wage to work at projects in southern California. Arthur took the job and was sent to work clearing brush behind the LAX airport, where a chain-link fence enclosed a sandy area heralded by a sign: “The El Segundo Blue Butterfly Habitat.”

The story goes that Arthur asked some guy next to him how anyone could keep a butterfly locked up with a chain-link fence. Rudi replied that the butterflies would stay near their food and host plants. He gave Arthur some books on the subject.

In 1994, Rudi began an insect survey on a small area owned by the United States Navy in the Palos Verdes peninsula. Nearby, men on bulldozers were replacing an underground pipeline. Rudi saw a little blue thing, whoosh, fly by. He caught it. In his hand he held a Palos Verdes Blue.

The caterpillars of the Palos Verdes Blue spend most of their life inside a milkvetch seedpod, where they feed on seeds high in protein and fat. They get into the pod by making a small hole, through which ants later enter to protect the larvae in exchange for a good time, a bit of honeydew, maybe a song or a pheromone. The caterpillars will also feed and live among the flower heads of deerweed. The adults emerge from late January through March and fly about for five days. The males, an inch across, have the typical shimmery blue wings edged in white; the females are brownish blue. The underside of both are light gray with black dots circled in white.

Rudi was off like a car alarm to the men working on bulldozers. “You’ll have to stop, guys,” he said, and remembers later, “They were quite nice about it.” Then he called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. An extinct species had reappeared, some two hundred blues surviving among the scrub brush and storage tanks of a government fuel depot.

The Department of Defense, which controls 25 million acres in the United States, has a profound understanding of the Endangered Species Act. Some biologists consider our often huge military bases to be inadvertent “arks,” protected to an extraordinary degree from public access and public use (such as grazing). These bases are home to over one hundred threatened or endangered species.

The navy responded promptly. They worked with Rudi to monitor the butterfly’s population. They built a small lab on the site that could breed Palos Verdes Blues to be released into the wild. And they began clearing non-native vegetation and reestablishing over thirty historic plant species, including milkvetch and deerweed.

Later that year, Rudi hired Arthur Bonner to work full-time at the new Palos Verdes lab. Eventually, Arthur would be responsible for the replanting of the coastal sage community and for the lab’s rearing of captive butterflies.

In various accounts of his life, Arthur usually says a version of the same thing, “I’m saving these butterflies from extinction, and they’re saving me, too.”

By 2003, estimates for the El Segundo Blues ranged from 15,000 to 50,000. Rudi worries that further restoration work at the butterfly habitat is not getting done. Non-native species are creeping back in. Still, both the El Segundo and Palos Verdes Blues now have a home.

Arthur Bonner continues to work at the Palos Verdes lab and to take inner-city kids out on field trips. They look at caterpillars. They look at butterflies. Some of these children need a lot of convincing. They find it hard to believe that the one thing turns into the other.