Endangered Dakota skippers released in renewed prairie landscape
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Updated: July 26, 4 p.m. | Posted: July 23, 4 a.m.
A butterfly species once common on Minnesota’s prairie is fluttering again over native flowers and grasses. Hundreds of endangered Dakota skipper butterflies were reintroduced recently to Glacial Lakes State Park, and now biologists are hoping they thrive there.
The butterflies were once common in west-central Minnesota. They were last spotted in Glacial Lakes State Park in 2005. In 2014 they became federally listed as endangered in Minnesota and threatened in the U.S.
Dakota skippers need a native prairie habitat to survive. Only 1 percent of the landscape remains in the state.
“For wildlife that depend on prairie that's a real problem because they really get isolated within these last little fragments,” said conservation biologist Erik Runquist.
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With funding from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, the Minnesota Zoo partnered with state parks to enhance the prairie. DNR parks and trails supervisor Cindy Lueth says they started planting more purple coneflower, a drought-tolerant nectar source for butterflies to prepare for the Dakota skipper’s arrival.
“We’ve done a lot of work really intensively over the past several years getting ready for these moments and it was just exciting to have it all come together and have the little things flying around the park where they once were common,” said Lueth.
Adult skippers were released and laid eggs during the last weeks of June and first weeks of July. They are now hatching and will enter the winter as a fully grown caterpillar.
The Minnesota Zoo now has the ability to produce thousands of butterflies by maintaining and breeding a population at the zoo over several years. The individuals they don't use for breeding are eligible for reintroduction next spring. The zoo hopes to use their skipper population as a source to restart more wildlife populations.
Runquist says the reintroduction of skippers will help many other parts of the ecosystem.
“If we can figure out the conditions needed to bring back the Dakota skippers or other butterflies, that is going to be helping us figure out how to enhance prairies, that's going to be bringing back many other species at the same time,” Runquist said.
The Minnesota Zoo and DNR are now focusing on the habitat threshold for skippers to reproduce.
