Zoo trying to prevent extinction of 'most Minnesotan' butterfly

Biologists at the Minnesota Zoo are scrambling to prevent a modern day extinction of a species that once thrived in Minnesota. The Poweshiek skipperling is a butterfly that lives its whole life in the prairies of the upper Midwest. But the tallgrass prairie is mostly gone. And so is a species that was once among the most common butterflies in Minnesota.

Erik Runquist leads the Minnesota Zoo's Prairie Butterfly Conservation Program, which started work in 2012. He calls the Poweshiek skipperling the "most Minnesotan" of all butterflies because more of its historic range fell in the state than any other butterfly.

As recently as a decade ago, the skipperlings were too numerous for biologists to bother to count. But their population has declined sharply in the last 10 years and no Poweshiek skipperlings have been observed in Minnesota since 2007. They also appear to be gone from Iowa and North and South Dakota.

Minnesota once had an estimated 18 million acres of prairie land -- of which less than 1 percent now remains, Runquist says.

Now the Butterfly Conservation Program, with funds from the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, is trying to capture females where the species does exist -- in Wisconsin and Manitoba -- and hatch their eggs in the lab. Runquist reluctantly forsees a day when Poweshiek skipperlings will exist primarily, if not exclusively, in a zoo environment.

A similar species, the Dakota skipper, is also high on the program's priority list. According to the program's website, butterflies are "'canary in the coalmine' indicators of prairie health because they are very sensitive to changes in their environment."

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