QUINA CHECKERSPOT

Status: Proposed for listing as an endangered species by the federal government.

Description of Adults: Large, for members of the checkerspot family, with wingspans of around three inches. Bands of black, white, and dark red coloration, arranged concentrically around the center of the thorax. Forewings are disproportionately short and rounded.

Life Cycle:
Egg: dome-shaped, ribbed, yellow at first, later turning red; the eggs are laid in masses on or near food plants; laid in late Winter or early Spring, hatch in late Spring or early Summer.
Larva: black, spiny, occurring in colonies on food plants, often members of the Figwort family of plants; after hatching, they feed until their food plants dry up, and then enter a diapause (a type of hibernation) until the following Spring, when they resume feeding before entering a pupa in late Summer.
Pupa: light gray, lined with some darker dots; hung from food plants or surrounding vegetation; the pupa stage may last one or more seasons, during which the larva is reorganizing itself into an adult.
Adult: emerges usually in early to mid Spring; feeds exclusively on a liquid diet, taking in a variety of flower nectars; males fly over the females in great numbers at low elevations in order to attract mates, many of which only recently emerged from the pupa state and have not yet fully unfolded their wings; reproduce in one brood per year.

Range: Coastal ranges of San Diego, Orange, and Riverside counties, California. Prefer metamorphic soils such as serpentine.

Survival Threats: Encroaching development is the major survival threat for the quino checkerspot. Because adolescent butterflies (the larva stage) tend to live in large, closely-related colonies, and because these colonies occasionally die out and await recolonization from surrounding colonies, development in prime quino checkerspot habitat which happens to be unoccupied at a given time constitutes a grave threat to this species' survival.