Purpose

What you see pictured is an Atala butterfly.  I had never seen these before until a few months ago on my daily walks to the gym.  There were dozens of them flying around a bunch of a type of plant which I now know is called coontie. Every day I would see the insects darting happily around the area and it made me happy for some reason.

Starting a couple weeks ago that happiness began to turn to sadness as I started seeing many if these beautiful insects on the sidewalk, either dead or dying.  I wasn’t sure what was going on that would cause this.  Well last week as I walked back from the gym there was a woman that was very closely monitoring the bushes and the butterflies around them.  She pointed to the leaves and showed me a number of pods clinging to the underside of the plant leaves.

Those pods are what eventually evolves from the large orange pouch you see in the picture.  The butterflies grow this caterpillar pouch over their short lifetime, stick it to a leaf of ONLY this plant, and then die shortly thereafter.  Evidently this species almost went extinct when coontie was being harvested for other uses but they have made a strong comeback in Florida with more coontie being planted in natural landscapes.  When the caterpillars hatch, they only want to eat coontie leaves.

Anyway, I thought this was little ecosystem was sort of amazing. The butterflies act of procreation being also an act of suicide has some deep symbolic imagery that I haven’t been able to verbalize satisfactorily.