The Face of Butterfly Day

Young Topangan Coyolli Jimenez Has Been Designated This Year’s Butterfly Day Goodwill Ambassador, Set to Take Place May 5

By BILL BUERGE | Contributing Writer

“Coyolli” is an Aztec name for a small ringing bell. It’s also the first name of the 12-year-old daughter of Sergio Jimenez, the man in charge of butterflies at The Mountain Mermaid in Topanga.

Sergio’s wife, Yaotl, said Coyolli has been helping her dad raise butterflies since she was 5 years old. Propagating live butterflies for the fifth annual Topanga Butterfly Day at Mermaid Mountain on May 5 is job-one for Sergio and Coyolli.

It seems only fitting that Coyolli be named this year’s Butterfly Day poster child with her image gracing, quite literally, the posters and other announcements proclaiming the event.

Butterfly Day at Mermaid Mountain

Thirty-three years ago, when I bought the historic Mermaid—originally a country club built in 1930—it was a crumbling ruin ready to collapse. I hired Sergio to work on the restoration crew and, long story short, he made himself indispensable, has lived here ever since and has embraced butterflies to such a degree that he’s known as “The Butterfly Whisperer” here in Topanga.

Butterfly Day is a nonprofit, pollinator-promoting nature festival that we host at the Mermaid every year. It’s a uniquely Topanga event for all ages, featuring a live butterfly house, California native butterfly plants for sale, environmental organizations, a live music festival, native Tongva ceremony, bee exhibit, a reptile and raptor show, face painting, arts and crafts, food and drink, and more.

About 1,500 people attended last year. This year, Sonic Butterfly, an inspired giant long-string harp that literally turns the entire Mermaid into a spectacular 100-foot-long musical instrument, will kick off the international migration tour of the monarch butterfly.

Pacific Palisades

Kids are instinctively drawn to butterflies. I know firsthand, since I fell hopelessly in love with butterflies as a youngster growing up in Pacific Palisades in the 1950s.

Back then, the Palisades was more like Topanga is today. There were wide open fields and running creeks, and a single mom-and-pop grocery store. My dad said he could have bought all of Potrero Canyon for $700.

Walking to Palisades Elementary School, I was awestruck by the colorful striped swallowtail caterpillars on the bright green anise plants growing wild everywhere and smelling like licorice. I collected the anise caterpillars and those of other species, and reared them in my bedroom.

Like a mother bird, I brought them anise cuttings to eat, and watched in wonder as they morphed into chrysalises and then into flying color-saturated creatures. I’ve always had an artist’s eye, and butterflies are the ultimate eye candy.

It’s a familiar story told by many lepidopterists and entomologists (butterfly and insect scientists), that they got hooked on butterflies and insects when they were knee-high to a grasshopper. Suffice it to say that for me, raising butterflies for the Mermaid butterfly house and hosting Butterfly Day is a boyhood dream come true.

Growing Butterflies

Growing butterflies in captivity is a challenging and protracted process, requiring much patience following the elongated and complex four-stage butterfly lifecycle from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis, culminating in the winged adult.

Rearing butterflies is an arcane endeavor practiced for fun by hobbyists, or for profit by butterfly breeders and butterfly farmers to provide specimens for live butterfly exhibits, scientific research, and for release at weddings, memorials, and such.

Sadly, many butterflies are propagated each year only to be euthanized, pinned, mounted and sold to butterfly collectors or as souvenirs, or trafficked illegally on the global black market for rare and endangered species

Webster’s defines a butterfly house, flight-house, conservatory or lepidopterarium as a facility that is specifically intended for the breeding and display of butterflies with an emphasis on education. The Mermaid Butterfly House is strictly for learning, inspiration and delight, with proceeds from Butterfly Day donated to various nonprofit environmental organizations.

Without plants, animal life would perish. Coyolli and her dad know all too well how fundamental plants are to butterfly farming. You need large amounts of the right kind of plants at the right time. Butterflies and plants evolved together over millions of years worldwide, and are inextricably interdependent and specialized one to the other.

Each species of butterfly has only one or a select few plant species, called their host plants, that they are able to eat as caterpillars. Adult butterflies, however, are not as picky as the caterpillars and will consume flower nectar from most any flowering plant, which are called their nectar plants.

Egg Stage

We have found it most effective and disease-free to begin rearing butterflies by collecting butterfly eggs in the wild. Knowledge of butterfly behavior and host plant relationships helps Sergio and Coyolli locate the tiny eggs.

Looking for infinitesimally small butterfly eggs on big bushes and trees is not unlike trying to find the proverbial “needle in a haystack.” Better to spot a female butterfly on the wing and try and follow her to see exactly where she lays her eggs.

Females can lay between 300 to 500 eggs over a two- to five-week period and can sense their host plants from great distances. As they hone in on their target, they will flit and bob from plant to plant, touching and actually tasting them through sense organs in their feet to pinpoint the proper host plant.

Males, on the other hand, are scouting for receptive females, and will exhibit different flying behaviors as they court and vigorously pursue prospective mates. Once a female finds her host plant, she will usually deposit the eggs out of the view of predators on the undersides of the leaves, excreting a rapidly hardening glue.

Coyolli and Sergio know to look mostly under the leaves for the eggs. Extracting the eggs one by one by hand would damage them, so Sergio has taught Coyolli to carefully snip off the leaves with the egg(s) still attached, then place them in a small container.

Caterpillar Stage

Caterpillars eat voraciously and will increase in size thousands of times during their lifecycle stage. Upon emerging from the egg, a caterpillar will first devour its eggshell and then begin eating the leaf onto which it was deposited. Sergio and Coyolli have to add more leaves to the rearing enclosures to keep up.

Caterpillars produce prodigious amounts of caterpillar excrement pellets, called “frass.” Captive breeding of any animal—cats or caterpillars—is an unnaturally crowded state prone to rapid disease transmission, so the rearing enclosures need to be cleaned often, and great care must be taken to sanitize hands and equipment.

The caterpillar stage is the longest in the butterfly lifecycle. It can last from several weeks to several months.

Sergio and Coyolli must be prepared with sufficient amounts of the various host plants for the many different butterfly species they are rearing. Fortunately, we have ample butterfly host plants in the Mermaid’s butterfly gardens where the leaves can be harvested for caterpillar food.

Examples of these are oak, sycamore, passion vine, citrus and milkweed. Other host plants are raised from seed and others are purchased.

There’s a number of nursery areas at the Mermaid solely dedicated to growing, potting and storing the hundreds of host plants required. Coyolli and Sergio also need to raise or buy additional hundreds of potted flowering nectar plants to feed the adult butterflies in the butterfly house.

For a long time it was believed that the contents of a chrysalis was an amorphous liquid goo. More recent science shows however that specific caterpillar body parts transmute inside the chrysalis into specific adult butterfly parts. For example, the caterpillar’s mandibles used for chewing will evolve into the adult butterfly’s proboscis, or feeding tube. (How cool is that?)

Chrysalis Stage

Once a caterpillar is fully grown, it enters the chrysalis stage, and will spin filaments of silk to attach itself to the tops and sides of the rearing enclosures. A hard, protective shell forms around it as if by magic.

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis and transforms into an exquisitely folded adult butterfly package waiting to unfurl. The chrysalis stage typically lasts one to two weeks.

Adult Stage

Once metamorphosis is complete, the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis fully formed and ready to soar, mate and lay eggs. The length of this stage depends on the species of butterfly, and can vary from several days to several months.

When a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis, its wings are seriously wrinkled. The butterfly will hang wings down and slowly pump them full of fluids to straighten them out.

The lifespan of most adult butterflies is two to three weeks, but it can vary greatly among different species.

We raise butterflies because we love being around them, and to have live specimens for our educational tours of the butterfly house throughout the year and on Butterfly Day.

I do wish our butterfly house was a bigger habitat so the butterflies had more room to fly. Maybe someday.

I find consolation knowing that the butterflies in our butterfly house have a far better chance of survival than those in the wild. In nature, only 1 or 2% of butterflies will make it from egg to adult.

The Mermaid Butterfly House is designed to be a predator-proof environment against ants, wasps, lizards, frogs, rats, mice, possums and racoons that all eat butterflies during one or more of butterfly life stages. Butterfly life may seem idyllic to us, but it’s a short and tough existence, fraught with danger.

Forty years ago there were few live butterfly exhibits worldwide. Since then, they have grown massively in popularity on every continent, spawning a big cottage industry in butterfly farming.

Farming butterflies as a livelihood has lifted many families out of poverty in third-world countries and all around the world. Live butterfly exhibitors usually purchase their butterflies from butterfly breeders and brokers, but our goal is to show butterflies that are homegrown in Topanga.

My Wild Ride in the Wee Small Hours

Due to the rainy, cold winter and late spring in Topanga last year, we had raised only a small fraction of the number of butterflies needed for Butterfly Day, so we ordered more from a butterfly farm.

But then, it got to be late in the day on the Saturday before Butterfly Day, and UPS had not yet delivered the butterflies. They had always arrived on time before without a hitch.

In a panic, I repeatedly called UPS until I finally got an after-hours rep who said they were now closed, the shipment was inside a locked facility at LAX, everybody had gone home and there was nothing he could do about it. What now?

In a cold sweat, I searched the web and called butterfly breeders for hours with no luck. Everybody was shut down for the weekend. What would Butterfly Day be without butterflies?

At half-past midnight, early on the morning of Butterfly Day, exhausted, bereft of butterflies and feeling hopeless, I finally gave up, resigned to my fate and crashed.

At 3 a.m. the phone rang. It was a man that I had called earlier saying he had more than 100 live butterflies that I could come get immediately.

I got in my truck and raced to Orange County where I met him in his bathrobe on his front doorstep, paid cash and got the butterflies. Then he said he had another 50 or so of another species, so I bought them, too.

I sped back to Topanga, pooped, but proud, sleepy and struggling to stay awake, lest I fall asleep, crash and disappoint untold hundreds of expectant children. The sun was just coming up as I drove through the Mermaid’s front gates on the morning of Butterfly Day 2023, thanking the butterfly gods and vowing to have a better, fail-safe butterfly propagation plan for 2024.

Topanga Homegrown

The goal for Butterfly Day 2024 is to raise all of our own butterflies. Sergio, Coyolli, Yaotl and I have been working on it all year.

We assembled a beautiful new butterfly propagation room with gleaming stainless steel tables and new breeding enclosures. Sergio purchased a new microscope for detecting pathogens and other butterfly rearing paraphernalia.

Butterflies are warm weather creatures with a natural tendency to go dormant or migrate during the colder months, so they are much harder to raise this time of year. I can’t make promises for mother nature, but so far, it’s looking good.

On a more sobering note, I fear we may be a lot further down the road of another mass extinction than we want to know. Granted, humans are an impressive species with big brains and such, but we are a self-absorbed and shortsighted one, and tend to play fast and loose with mother nature.

Scientists speculate that if all the insects perish, the food chain would collapse and humans would become a memory. Monarchs are fast going extinct. Bees are collapsing. Even ants that were once my common companions, I hardly see them anymore.

Unless we adapt and change our ways, humans could become an evolutionary afterthought on the ash heap of natural history. We can’t let that happen.

Special Thanks

It is an honor to be able to host Butterfly Day at the Mermaid again this year. My heartfelt thanks goes out to Dr. Alicia Land-Hill, Dr. Kent Hill and Stephen Powers, co-founding members with me of the Butterfly Day Organizing Committee, to the extraordinary community of Topanga, to my ever-patient and supportive neighbors, to the fabulous Topanga Canyon Docents who manage the Butterfly House on Butterfly Day, to Theatricum Botanicum and Clare Brown for use of their parking facilities, and to all the wonderful volunteers.

Thanks to Coyolli, for being our inspiration this year, and to the entire Jimenez family. All of you are the unsung, heavy-lifting heroes of Butterfly Day to whom I am eternally grateful.

And, last but not least, thanks to all of the gorgeous butterflies that bring so much beauty, joy and grace into our world.

Story and photos by Bill Buerge, proprietor ofMountain Mermaid in Topanga and former resident of Pacific Palisades. Butterfly Day will take place on May 5 from10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Visit butterflyday.org for more information.