Not time in a bottle, but Pieris rapae in a bottle!
Here's the story.
Shapiro, who has monitored butterfly populations in central California since 1972 and maintains a website at https://butterfly.ucdavis.edu, has sponsored the contest since 1972 to seek the first cabbage white butterfly of the year in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano. It's all part of his scientific research involving long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate change.
The person who collects the first live P. rapae and is judged the winner, receives a pitcher of beer or its equivalent.
Shapiro will be drinking his own beer.
Shapiro collected the butterfly along railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County, at 12:13 p.m. that day. “When I collected it, I looked in my pocket for the little pill box to put it in,” he said. “It was not there.”
What to do?
At a nearby unoccupied homeless encampment, he spotted a trashed Big Blue soda bottle. He gingerly lowered the butterfly inside the bottle and wadded a paper towel to close the opening.
“I don't know what Big Blue is,” he said Friday. “Never heard of it.”
It's sold in Walmart and is advertised as "a refreshing way to get the carbonation you love and a boost to get you through the day at the same time...This drink is low sodium and is well suited to have with a meal. It is nice to have while chilled, or simply poured over ice."
Daryl Allen, vice president of finance at StackHawk, Seattle, who, in his leisure time, writes the popular Sodafry blog, disagrees. He reviewed Big Red and Big Blue in his Sept. 23, 2016 blog: "I thought that Big Red was too sweet, Big Blue might be a weaponized version of soda. For real, I thought that four of my teeth rotted at first contact. The only discernible flavor I could pick out was corn syrup."
But back to Art Shapiro and his research.
On Jan. 15, Shapiro emailed his posse of fellow scientists and butterfly enthusiasts: “West Sac has generated more first rapae than any other location, probably because much of the route is along the south-facing side of the railroad embankment. The forecast looked perfect, so I went there. 64F, clear, dead calm. The lack of rain this month has dried up all the mud and most of the puddles. The vegetation has if anything regressed; there is less in bloom now than last time--one Hirschfeldi (mustard family), three Raphanus (wild radish), and several each Melilotus alba (white sweetclover) and Sonchus (sow thistles). Five homeless, including a young woman with a dog that looks like a dingo and has its ribs showing. One butterfly--an antiopa (mourning cloak). No rapae. It sure felt like a rapae day, though!”
Pop Goes the Weasel. In his Jan. 23rd email to his posse, with the subject line "Pop Goes the Weasel," Shapiro wrote: “The minute I arrived at my West Sac site---at noon--I KNEW rapae would be out. It was, A female showed up at 12:13 and I caught her visiting Raphanus three minutes later! She's in the fridge in my lab at Storer.”
P. rapae is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, Shapiro says. "Since 1972, the first flight of the cabbage white butterfly has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20."
His collaborator and former doctoral student Matthew Forister, the McMinn Professor of Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno, provides an annual graph. “Only a few days behind model prediction, as you can see by the position of the red dot (this year) a bit above the line,” noted Forester, who received his PhD in ecology from UC Davis in 2004.
Since 1972, Shapiro has been defeated only four times and those were by UC Davis graduate students. Adam Porter won in 1983; Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s; and Jacob Montgomery in 2016. The first three were his own graduate students.
The butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow. It's a white butterfly with black dots on the upperside, which may be faint or not visible in the early season. The male is white. The female is often slightly buffy; the "underside of the hindwing and apex of the forewing may be distinctly yellow and normally have a gray cast,” Shapiro said. “The black dots and apical spot on the upperside tend to be faint or even to disappear really early in the season.”
In its larval stage, the cabbage white butterfly is a pest of cole crops, including cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli.
Interesting that Shapiro collected or recorded the last four winning butterflies at the same railroad site in West Sacramento. Yes, he has collected P. rapae at other sites.
For example, he recorded the 2020 winner at the Putah Creek Nature Park, Winters, Yolo County, at 11:16 a.m. on Jan. 30 and the 2019 winner near the Suisun Yacht Club, Solano County at 1:12 p.m., Friday, Jan. 25. Some of the other sites included Davis.
None, however, has ever been "bottled" in a Big Blue.
Attached Images:
