Upon a thyme
Some thymes are ordinary, restrained, under control, stuck on the shelf. The best of thymes however are wild and untamed, basking on sunny slopes in perfumed abandon, where some may even have a tall tale to tell. A certain Mr Shakespeare knew where such thyme might be savoured, but even he could never have conjured as complex a saga as that of a particular butterfly that also cavorted on those banks of wild thyme.
Once upon a time, Victorian lepidopterists were so besotted by the beautiful and enigmatic Large Blue butterfly that they hunted and impaled them to oblivion. In 1979, they were finally declared extinct in Britain.
Decades of scientific attempts to re-establish them on the South Downs were doomed to failure, as the caterpillars never survived more than three weeks in captivity, although lavishly fed on the flowers and shoots of wild thyme. This remained a puzzle for many years, until several other significant key players were identified. And so unravels the extraordinary tale of the Thyme, the Butterfly, the Bunny, the Ant, and Battenburg Man …
Large Blue ladies spend their brief lives flirting and flouncing around tussocks of thyme, and finally deposit their tiny pincushion eggs amongst the leaves. However, they are very selective about where their children will grow up, and it’s all down to the right location, and the most specific of neighbours. They choose plants that grow on anthills on sunny slopes, but the hills must be occupied by red ants. Furthermore, they have to be a very specific sub-species of red ant, called Myrmica. This ant has a few quirky attributes. Being hyper-sensitive to both temperature and humidity, it can only survive on warm sunny banks where the grass is grazed short by either sheep or rabbits. It was these ants who became the unseen victims of a couple of decades of change in agricultural grazing policies and the introduction of Myxamytosis that decimated all the bunnies. Coincidentally, the Large Blue butterflies vanished around the same time.
And this is where the plot thickens, for our lyrically beautiful blue dancer has a dark side, being the cuckoo of the butterfly world, and a flesh-chomping predator to boot. All the other tribes of red ant are well wise to this and will seek and destroy her wriggly children as they blithely munch on the sweet flowers and shoots of the abundant thyme that thatches the ant mounds, protecting them from downpours.
However, the hapless Myrmicans have fallen for an outrageously Shakespearian act of disguise. Having gorged themselves on flowers, followed by a dessert of their smaller siblings, the largest of the Blue’s caterpillars drop to the ground. Here, they commence secretion of a scented and addictive gloop that fiendishly mimics the smell of the red ants’ own larvae. The devoted social worker ants promptly scamper to the rescue and nobly bear the caterpillar cad down to their underground palace nursery. Now cosily ensconced, our intruder hardens its skin to protect it from attack, and then begins to impersonate the chittery, rubbery song of a queen ant. This, in particular, will guarantee that for the next nine months our young pretender will be cherished and lavished like a young queen, whilst casually chomping on the surrounding ant grubs. When it is about a hundred times its original size, it will chrysalise until late spring, when it will emerge and just flutter off, without a word of gratitude, to start the next generation.
A certain Professor Thomas dedicated years of obsessive study to unravel and piece together the truth as related above. And it is entirely thanks to him, and his lavish use of bait trails of nothing less than morsels of Battenburg cake to lure ants to his many field projects, that this strange and symbiotic saga could ultimately be understood. And, as a result, new colonies were successfully established in a total of twenty-nine locations across the UK. Great for the Large Blues and their admirers, but a bit of an ongoing bummer for the trusting Myrmicans.
How Shakespeare would have loved this fable of beauties and beasts, of dark duplicity and gormless gullibility, of opportunism and survival, and the hidden complex and critical connectedness that unites us all on this small frail planetary stage.