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The butterfly effect
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About
For thousands of years, flocks of beautiful Calliope Silverspot butterflies would amble delicately past Owens Lake, drifting with and driving against the wind, as they do, heading up to the saline wetlands of the many small terminus lakes that dot the lower moraines of the Sierra Nevada for nesting season.
Before the aqueduct, Owens Lake was much too voluminous to have the extreme salinity that the federally endangered Silverspots craved. After the aqueduct, there was no water at all. Until 2006, when the LADWP diverted about 5% of the original Owens River supply back onto the Owens Lake lakebed in a managed distribution to its shallow flooding dust control zones. Ironically, it turns out shallow flooding pools are a more attractive nesting condition for Silverspots than mother nature offers in the moraines. Now the butterflies swarm the LADWP site.
Chasing the most water-efficient balance of ground coverage and evaporation resistance, control directives require a network of automated sensors and human controllers to monitor and adjust supply through thousands of miles of pipes to keep water levels at an “hourly optimal” depth. Somewhere between 3 and 5 inches, depending on air temperature and sun exposure. Pumping too much water to shallow flooding polygons is a waste when all that’s needed is a barrier on top of the dust, but pumping too little increases evaporation rates.
As it turns out, 3 to 5 inches of water, hypersalinating as it evaporates, is an artificially perfect Silverspot habitat. And while it sounds positive for endangered species to find new habitat, there is a complex labyrinthe of ecosystemic knock-on effects with unpredictable and dangerous ramifications. In this case, arriving butterflies cannot discern between pools marked “indefinite”, habitat that will probably last the nesting cycle but are obvious targets for food industry poachers enabled by easier road access than up in the moraines, or pools marked “seasonal” which appear the same but with the press of a button or malfunction of a sensor can dry up within a day, stranding nests.
Legal battles continue where even environmentalists within the EPA are divided whether to mandate seasonal pools to be pumped past need, wasting water but preserving habitat, or allow water conservation to take priority over butterfly nests that will dry out. As the negotiations drag into a second decade, a scattershot approach has developed on the lake in the meantime, improvising short term solutions like nest-nets or sonic deterrents to trap butterflies in good areas or discourage them from bad ones. Enactment made more complicated by the only very clear laws being the federal prohibition on government employees performing any operation within 20 yards of the nest of a listed endangered species, and timed shut-downs for machinery near sightings.
It seems unfortunate that by choosing our engineered landscape as their home, the Silverspots have made us their arbiter. Yet, through the beauty of their meandering flightpath, they remind us of nature’s absolute irreverence for our rules and arguments. In this place, so artificial and so natural, where a single butterfly has the legal power to stop an excavator, we should know by now that it is never clear who is the arbiter of who.
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