Oregon Silverspot Butterfly

Insects…the good, the bad and the ugly…they are all around us. Few of us stop to think that without them we would all perish because if we had no pollinators we would eventually have no food, not to mention all of the other myriad things that they contribute to the ecosystem. Now I must admit that if I see a spider skittering across my wall, I don’t hesitate to squash it. I am not advocating that we let insects run rampant…shudder…but I am just saying that they are important and under appreciated, besides being fascinating and sometimes quite beautiful.

A work-in-progress painting on vellum of an Oregon silverspot butterfly (Speyeria zerene hippola) and its host plant, the purple Viola adunca, along with another violet the butterfly pollinates, the Stream Violet or Viola glabella.

I mentioned in a previous post that I planned to include insects in my botanical paintings as often as possible because I want to say all I can about the particular plant featured and to give some indication of the larger context of the plant. When I began to research the native plant, Early Violet or Viola adunca, I found that the caterpillar of the Oregon silverspot butterfly ate only one food, the leaves of the Early Violet! Because of the loss of many salt marshes and meadows along the Oregon coast where Early Violets used to thrive, these caterpillars have lost much of their food source and the species has become threatened.  Fortunately, both Portland’s Oregon Zoo and Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo are not only propagating and releasing Silverspot butterflies along the coast, but planting thousands of Early Violets in an effort to restore the Oregon Silverspot butterfly population in the wild.

Work-in-progress painting of a Silverspot butterfly caterpillar on its host plant, the Early Violet.  In the painting, the caterpillar is about 3/4″ (2 cm.) long.

Although I prefer to paint from an actual specimen, the butterfly and its caterpillar are rare so my chances of observing it and getting photos in the wild were virtually nil. I had to rely on the few reference photos available online and change the position of the butterfly enough to avoid copyright infringement. The challenge of painting the caterpillar was making visual sense of all of the little hairs, or setae, and the orange spiracles that protrude from its side. I didn’t want it to become a blur of little black lines and orange dots. I decided to use shades of black to differentiate the near hairs from the farther ones. The near ones are painted a warm brownish black and the far ones bluish black because the blue tones tend to visually recede. Since the caterpillar is quite small, even after I magnifying it 1.5 times in the painting, I had to use a 5x magnifying glass and a very small brush to get the fine detail and keep the image crisp.  The Silverspot caterpillar goes through several stages, and the one I depicted is a latter one.  I’ve even learned something about caterpillar anatomy in this process!

I plan to include one more insect that is part of the violet’s story, but will tell you about that in a later post.