People have always been captivated by butterflies.
Whether for the vibrant, glimmering colours and patterns on their wings, the seemingly weightless way they flap and tumble through the sky, or the chrysalitic process they go through that spurs a million metaphors of hope, resurrection and transformation, there’s something about them that we just don’t seem to get from other insects.
Our love for these creatures has often expressed itself in a desire to own them—even if that ends their lives mid-flight. Across centuries, people have been catching and killing butterflies for collections: they may well be the “most extensively traded animals on the planet.”
A ‘jewel in the crown’ for many collectors is the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly (QABB), or Ornithoptera alexandra—the largest known butterfly in the world. Trading it is illegal, but single specimens still earn poachers up to USD 10,000 on the black market: they’re relatively easy to smuggle, since they don’t show up on x-ray scanners at international ports. Females of the species, which are brown with yellow markings, can span almost 30 centimetres (12 inches) from wingtip to wingtip. The males are smaller but more dramatically decorated, their matt-black wings streaked with iridescent green, yellow and blue.
Familiar to Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s Indigenous clans for tens of thousands of years, the QABB was ‘discovered’ by Western science in 1906. Then, Londonian naturalist Albert Stewart Meek, on a mission to capture new species, spotted an enormous and unfamiliar butterfly flying high in the forest canopy, somewhere on the Popondetta Plain in today’s Oro Province—lifted his gun and shot it out of the sky.
These days, Oro Province proudly portrays a silhouette of the QABB on its flag, and in the market stalls of provincial capital Popondetta, you can buy a t-shirt emblazoned with the insect’s image. But to see the butterfly itself, you’ll need to drive a long way out of town, past burning rubbish piles and barbed-wire fences and the hundreds of rows of oil palm that now replace this creature’s natural habitat.
The QABB’s known range is now just 140 square kilometres (54 square miles), almost exclusively in native rainforest. It relies specifically on several closely related species of Aristolochia vine that sprawl through the undergrowth, which represent the sole food source for its caterpillars and the only site on which it lays its eggs.
“It’s their food, and also their home,” says Elton Nukara, who lives in Dareki Village on the Province’s Managalas Plateau, one of the species’ last two strongholds and the site of the massive new Managalas Conservation Area (MCA), which was developed following a thirty-year process facilitated by local NGO Partners with Melanesians (PWM) and funded by the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN).
Elton Nukara points out the vine on which the QABB lays its eggs. Photo by Monica Evans / CIFOR-ICRAF
A sinewy man in his 20s, Nukara has recently taken on his father’s role of tending one of the Plateau’s ‘butterfly farms’. The project seeks to help the species proliferate by capturing and keeping caterpillars and chrysalises in a green-mesh shade house, safe from birds and spiders, until they hatch into butterflies and can be released into the forest.
While the work is well-intentioned, there’s not yet enough research into the species’ life cycle to know whether this is indeed an effective conservation strategy. And, hatching butterflies into confinement could make them an easier target for poachers: smuggling of the species still happens, and Managalas remains the most likely source. On the other hand, some conservationists advocate for relaxing protections on trading butterflies and encouraging the development of commercial breeding facilities, as doing so could create greater incentives for locals to preserve their habitats while providing viable livelihoods.
Elton Nukara in front of the butterfly house. Photo by Monica Evans / CIFOR-ICRAF
Two Ornithoptera priamus mating. Photo by Danumurthi Mahendra / CIFOR-ICRAF
At the farm—a small clearing at the edge of the rainforest about ten minutes’ walk from the village, across a creek and through a field of banana and cassava—Nukara introduces us to some of the current residents, who he treats with great affection and care. The caterpillars are the largest and strangest I’ve ever seen: ink-black, studded with long scarlet spines, about as thick as my big toe and up to 12 centimetres (5 inches) long. They feed solely on the leaves of Aristolochia vines, which are toxic to many animals, making them unpalatable to predators.
A QABB chrysalis. Photo by Monica Evans / CIFOR-ICRAF
Elton Nukara points out Aristolochia vine. Photo by Monica Evans / CIFOR-ICRAF
Nukara points out a withered vine wrapped around one of the trees, and a chrysalis glued to a branch higher up. “Once a caterpillar is ready to become a chrysalis, they come down lower on the vine and eat all the way through it,” he says. “Then they climb back up and make their chrysalis.”
His theory is that this is a self-defense mechanism: “Soon the whole vine will die, like this one and that means other animals can’t climb up it to eat them. It’s like they’re pulling the ladder up after them to keep themselves safe.” Others speculate that the behaviour causes the vine to produce new shoots to host subsequent generations of caterpillars; once again, more research is needed to better understand the process at play.
To summarize: the butterfly needs the vine; the vine needs the rainforest to sprawl over; the rainforest needs the people of Managalas to keep it safe; and, the people may well need the butterfly, too.
The birdwing has become an emblem of conservation, a symbol of the unique animal and plant life of the region and a drawcard for much-needed funding from biodiversity-focused donors such as RFN and the European Union (EU). Locals hope that this interest and investment in the region’s biodiversity will also help them to meet development aspirations, such as for jobs, healthcare, roading and education, in sustainable and non-destructive ways.
A freshly emerged male Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing. Photo by Angelus Palik / Swallowtails and Birdwings: Butterfly Trust
How exactly funding can support both conservation and development in the region remains an open question—less clear-cut than the butterfly’s bond with its vine. That tension sits at the heart of the work now underway by the Managalas Conservation Foundation (MCF), the local agency implementing the new conservation area, alongside staff from the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), with backing from the European Union. Together with representatives from the Plateau’s 152 clans, they are drafting the area’s first official management plan.
Their challenge: to find ways the land can support both sustainable livelihoods and long-term conservation. Ideas on the table include a biodiversity research centre—where the Queen Alexandra Birdwing would no doubt take centre stage—alongside ecotourism initiatives like birdwatching, butterfly spotting and hiking and sustainable farming of crops such as coffee, cocoa and timber. Now comes the real test: putting these ideas into practice and seeing which ones truly take flight.
For more information on this project, please contact William Unsworth (CIFOR-ICRAF): w.unsworth@cifor-icraf.org
We want you to share Forests News content, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to redistribute our material for non-commercial purposes. All we ask is that you give Forests News appropriate credit and link to the original Forests News content, indicate if changes were made, and distribute your contributions under the same Creative Commons license. You must notify Forests News if you repost, reprint or reuse our materials by contacting forestsnews@cifor-icraf.org.
