Rosier future for rare butterfly
The heat lamps have been blazing for half an hour in Jana Johnson's laboratory, orange light flooding over a sea of plastic cups. Johnson hovers, waiting for metamorphosis. She points at a brown pod in one of the cups.
"Look at the seams. This one is ready to pop," she says.
The seam widens. A sliver of gray wing appears.
"Go. Go. Go," she cajoles. "You can do it. Go."
In a double-wide trailer in San Pedro, Johnson is presiding over the rebirth of the Palos Verdes blue, one of the rarest butterflies in America. As manager of a pioneering program to breed the butterfly in captivity, she has witnessed hundreds of moments like this one: butterfly after butterfly crawling out of its pod, or pupa casing, lured by the spring-like warmth and light.
Johnson, 37, a Texas-born biologist with an affinity for country music, never tires of the drama. Each "pop" means that the Palos Verdes blue is one butterfly further from extinction.
Slightly more than 200 Palos Verdes blues remain in the wild, virtually all of them on a 330-acre military fuel depot uphill from the Port of Los Angeles.
This is proving a bountiful year for boosting the numbers of the thumbnail-sized creature with cobalt blue wings and a hankering for Gatorade.
Pupae are popping in greater numbers than ever. Johnson has been tending to a bumper crop of 720, half in San Pedro and half at a new site at Moorpark College in Ventura County.
Now she is ringmaster of a four-ring circus -- new butterflies, the eggs they lay, larvae and more pupae.
She is lucky to catch four hours of sleep before she zigzags from her home in the Winnetka neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, 40 miles southeast to San Pedro or 23 miles northwest to Moorpark, fueled by coffee and the music of Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks.
If the Palos Verdes blue is to rebound, scientists say, the program must produce enough pupae to establish colonies elsewhere on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
This month is prime time for butterfly "hatching," and Johnson arrives at her lab before the heat lamps click on at 7 a.m. She knows the first pupae will start popping at 7:30 a.m. with military-like precision.
She tries to coax butterflies out of their pods by talking to them in the same soothing tone she uses with her two sons, ages 7 and 4.
If a butterfly struggles, unable to spring free of its pod, she ratchets up the energy like a mother at a sports match.
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