A delicate, indelible beauty, gone in a flutter

I wonder if Bob Dole or Bill Clinton wonders about butterflies.Not the stay-up-late-at-night kind of wonder, just noticing there arenot as many as there were, and wondering what happened to them.

OK, so butterflies aren't exactly welfare or immigration. Andmaybe they aren't quite as compelling as family values or terrorismor all those other platform issues on the political scene this year.

But I've been wondering about butterflies. And what if they'regone.

When I was growing up, just about every empty lot in theneighborhood was populated by scores of fluttering insects. And Ididn't grow up in the country, or even a small town. My home was ina suburb near Newark, N.J., a city not renowned for its ecologicaldiversity.

But there were more than enough butterflies in the vacant lotsand playgrounds to provide a boy in the early '50s with hours ofdiversion. We could lie in the cool grass and watch the insects flylazily from plant to plant, doing whatever it was that butterfliesdid. When we captured one, we could marvel how the fine powder fromits wings clung to our fingers after we let it go. We even learnedto tell the difference between butterflies and those copycats, themoths.

The flocks of small white and yellow butterflies danced acrossour lives, bringing color and motion to the sultry days of summer.Now and then we'd even spot a more exotic Monarch, viceroy or someother brightly marked visitor.

These days, butterflies are rare in most neighborhoods. That'sbecause we aren't particularly butterfly-friendly.

Dr. Michael Wade of the University of Chicago blames, amongothers things, the paving-over of America. And Dr. Lincoln Brower ofthe University of Florida, perhaps the world's premier expert onbutterflies, says overbuilding and overuse of herbicides on lawns andfields also are at fault.

Environmentalists would argue - correctly - that not enough lawsprotect the habitat. And that these times of fewer regulations meanfewer butterflies.

So? What do we really need butterflies for? Just for kids tolook at?

There has been, said Wade, a growing appreciation for howinterconnected we are. Butterflies are a major pollinator offlowers, he said. Then he told me something I never would haveguessed: Butterflies mostly pollinate white and yellow flowers; beeshandle the red and purple ones. Such specialization is intriguing;without butterflies, would we lose those colors from our landscapes?

How seemingly disconnected things fit together often isoverlooked.

Last week, for instance, on the shores of Lake Erie it was likea science fiction movie. Call it "Invasion of the Mayflies," asrecord swarms of the insects attacked power plants in Toledo, Ohio,causing a power outage in one and forcing another to turn off outdoorlights to keep the critters at bay.

Why are there millions more mayflies this year? The answer,explained a Michigan scientist, is because there are more zebramussels. These interlopers migrated to the Great Lakes from Europein the ballast of ships. They've multiplied enough in our friendlywaters to cause environmental headaches. But no one connected zebramussels with mayflies.

However, it seems that the mussels enrich the sediment of thelake water, which nourishes the mayfly larva and - quicker than youcan say "we're all connected" - you have more mayflies than you canhandle.

What we don't know is whether butterflies, or the lack thereof,have a similar effect on some apparently unconnected event. Maybethe breeze from butterflies' wings in South America really doeschange the climate in Chicago.

Brower's concern is simpler, yet just as important. If we losethe butterfly, he said, we lose a richness of nature and a big partof a our biologic diversity. Whatever else they do in theenvironment - which is apparently plenty - butterflies also enrichour lives. Without them, he said, "what will stimulate ourchildren?"

Kids shouldn't grow up not knowing butterflies. And that shouldbe enough to make Bob Dole or Bill Clinton wonder.

Tom Sheridan is a member of the Sun-Times editorial board.E-mail: letters@suntimes.com