Butterflies Love Bait!

Years ago there was a television commercial by Nissan Corporation. It was actually a very cute commercial featuring an older gentleman and his Jack Russell Terrier, or maybe it was a Wire-haired Terrier. At the end of the commercial, the old man declares that, “Dogs love trucks!”

In the past few days, Butterfly Ridge has conducted an experiment and now declares, “Butterflies love bait!” And, we have the data to prove it!

We placed four of our bait sticks in our Homestead section of the trail and applied a different flavor of bait to each stick. The flavors included Pawpaw, Peach, Banana, and Apple. We then video recorded over two afternoons 4.717222 hours of footage of butterflies interacting with the bait. Then we went through the video, recording how much time each butterfly spent at each stick. The results would appear to declare that the favorite flavor of bait for our butterflies is Pawpaw!

Not only did the Pawpaw stick have the most visits by the butterflies (Figure 1) but it also had the longest time duration per visit with an average of each butterfly spending seventy seconds with the Pawpaw bait each visit (Figure 3). And while the Pawpaw appears to be the best, the Apple and Banana were not far behind. The Peach was really the only flavor that stood out as a poor choice.

If you are wondering why we make bait from these particular fruits, the answer is relatively simple. We have Pawpaw, Apple, and Peach growing on the property. One of our past interns now works at a food bank and she had a case of bananas that were going bad and none of their clients were selecting these bananas, so she donated them to us.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Of course, this is a relatively small window of study, but it certainly provides fruit for thought!

We first reported this study in social media. A friend asked the question if there was a difference in bait use based on butterfly species. The primary users of the bait this time of year are Question Marks and Eastern Commas. Those two species look VERY similar, and in the video it is very difficult to tell them apart. However, we did have Red-spotted Purple and Mourning Cloak also visit the stick, and those are easy to recognize.

The Mourning Cloak spent 18 seconds on the Pawpaw and then flew away. The Red-spotted Purple, over the duration of his visit actually spent time on each stick, a couple of stick with multiple visits. His order of visits were Apple, Pawpaw, Banana, Peach, Banana, and Apple. While he visited Apple and Banana twice each, the flavor of bait he spent the most time with was the Pawpaw. He spent a total of 259 seconds on Pawpaw, 137 seconds on Peach, 84 seconds on Apple, and 50 seconds on Banana.

I have placed below some of the video footage from this experiment. From the left, the order of the sticks is Pawpaw, Peach, Banana, and Apple. If you would like to conduct your own experiment, we have a large supply of Pawpaw, Apple, and Banana flavored baits currently in stock at Butterfly Ridge.