The spring day in 1960 when Paul Ehrlich caught his first bay checkerspot, Euphydryas editha, on Jasper Ridge in California was perhaps the butterfly ecology equivalent of Thomas Hunt Morgan bottling his first Drosophila melanogaster. Up until then, population ecology had tended to concentrate on very common species or those with boom and bust population cycles, and Ehrlich was looking for an unexceptional study organism with small, stable populations that would exemplify a "normal" species. He could hardly have envisaged that this butterfly would mark the beginning of over 30 years of intensive study of related species on both sides of the Atlantic. On the Wings of Checkerspots documents mat research effort, which focused primarily on two species: E, editha in North America and the Glanville fritillary, Melitaea cinxia, in Europe. Sadly, the story also includes the eventual extinction, in the late 1990s, of the bay checkerspot populations at Jasper Ridge.
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