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“Ah, yes, the purple milkweed,” Matt Pelikan, wildlife biologist at BiodiversityWorks, responded when I emailed him about the rare milkweed Tim Boland said hadn’t been spotted on-Island in 60 years. “File that one under, ‘It is better to be lucky than good.’ I'm not great with plants. But I am familiar with all of our common milkweeds, and I just happened to notice that the flowers on that clump of plants looked odd as I drove past. So on the way home, I checked it out. It's the same with any group of organisms: the way you find rarities is by learning the common stuff first.”
One point to make about rarities, he said, “is that we often don't even have a way to tell if something is rare or common. Plants, and some animal groups like birds, butterflies, fish, and mammals, are exceptions: They've been well studied and the status of every species that occurs here is known (thanks to the efforts of people like Tim Boland at Polly Hill). But with many groups of insects, nobody has paid any attention to them.” (Matt has. See the story he did for us about his backyard bugs.)
“Moreover, many common species are rarely seen because they're very good at staying hidden. So finding the first Vineyard occurrence of some fly or beetle absolutely does not mean you've found a rarity. It's more likely that you've simply bumped up against our profound ignorance of most of the natural species that live around us. Often, you're the first to find it not because it's rare but because you're looking, and you got lucky.”
Matt likes to talk about bugs. But back to the milkweed. On the day in June two years ago that he spotted it up-Island (he’d rather not say where, specifically), not quite sure what he was seeing, he took some photos on his phone, and uploaded them to iNaturalist.
There, he asked the citizen scientists who typically weigh in with opinions and advice, tagging a few he thought could confirm his suspicions: “Any thoughts on this one? Opinions have ranged from purpurascens to a hybrid to an odd syriaca, and I could believe any of the three.”
Several users, including Vineyarder Margaret Curtin, said “Yes!” when it was suggested that it was Purple Milkweed (Asclepias purpurascens). “Wow! Great find!”
Go to iNaturalist to find answers to your own botanical (or bug-related) mysteries, but stay for the conversation and community.
What an exciting–and gorgeous–find!