From the Miami blue to the Schaus’ swallowtail, South Florida is home to many endangered and declining pollinator species that only exist here.
The Miami blue butterfly alone has dropped by a minimum of 99% in area of occupancy and population size since 1992. To find out what’s happening, the Herald spoke to a conservation and research specialist at Zoo Miami, Tiffany Moore, to answer readers’ questions about the link to climate change.
Why are we seeing the number of our pollinators drop?
MOORE: There’s a number of things that are causing declines or population shifts. Number one is development. Outside Everglades National Park, there’s only less than 2% of Pine Rockland left — major developments over the decades have caused habitat loss for a lot of species. Second is climate change, and how things are just changing over the years, like an aspect of the plant that pollinators rely on.
As sea levels continue to rise, those little islands where the Miami blue butterfly exists will not exist in the future. With rising temperatures from climate change and rising waters in the ocean, we are seeing more catastrophic disturbance events like hurricanes, too, and we’re seeing more catastrophic hurricanes that are higher in categories or are more frequent, which affects butterflies.
How does that affect South Florida?
We have crops here, and fruit trees, so some farmers and different agricultural entities rely on pollinators for that. You’re not only just losing a crop, you’re also losing a lot of economic growth. [Plus,] we want to uphold as much biodiversity as we can because that is what keeps the ecosystem cycling. If we become a monoculture of just one thing, then you’re not producing the potential of what that forest could be.
Everything is connected in one way or another, and if you’re losing pollinators in the habitat here, you’re losing more than just the biodiversity. You’re losing the culture, our history. Native American tribes here have relied on certain plant species for their cultural practices over centuries—they’d be losing a piece of that history as well.
There’re so many complexities to the habitats here. If we lost all of the pollinators here, I think that we’d be losing much more than just the habitat; I think we’d be losing humanity.
What can we, as residents, do to aid pollinators?
If you’re building a garden, plant native plants and create corridors for pollinators. If you truly want to have a butterfly garden, you have to have a host plant and the flowering plant, to be able to feed the caterpillar and the adult. That sustains your garden so that those organisms come back and they remain in your garden, whereas just flying by just to get nectar from a flower and then moving on. But even if it’s just a potted plant that flowers, you’re still providing some type of habitat for pollinators.
Zoo Miami’s website has a garden guide for butterflies for Miami-Dade County, it provides host plants and nectar plants that are available in the commercial industries in South Florida, so you could go to any of the native stores and pick up these plants. We specifically made it so that it was easy and accessible to people, and we don’t want to recommend anything that’s not native.
This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. It was produced as part of a partnership between the Florida International University Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media and the Miami Herald. Alexandra Phelps is an FIU journalism student.
This story was originally published by the Miami Herald and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
