Douglas Tallamy diversity in our own backyard

[Gloria]

Acclaimed author and ecologist Douglas Tallamy explains the reasons behind the decline of native flora and fauna, and how we can work to reverse it from our own backyards.
Photos and story by Douglas Tallamy

A Call For Backyard Biodiversity | American Forests

Certain native staples are essential to any forest restoration within the suburban/urban matrix:

• Midwest: Bur oak, honeylocust, and crabapple


However, diversity is the real key to restoring native plant communities.


Midwest oak-savannah ecosystems can benefit from adding understory plantings of bottlebrush buckeye, rough dogwood, pawpaw, and wafer ash. Wafer ash, incidentally, is the primary host for the giant swallowtail butterfly, while pawpaw is the sole host for zebra swallowtails. And disease-resistant American elms are now available for urban restorations east of the Mississippi.

[Gloria]

About the pawpaw being the only host for zebra swallowtails

zebra swallowtail - Eurytides marcellus (Cramer)

Thought I would look into that and here is what I found.

The slimleaf pawpaw, Asimina angustifolia Raf. (Annonaceae) is a commonly-used host in central Florida for the zebra swallowtail,
Eurytides marcellus (Cramer).




Smallflower pawpaw, Asimina parviflora (Michx.)Dunal (Annonaceae),also a larval host for the zebra swallowtail, Eurytides marcellus

Common pawpaw, Asimina triloba (L.)Dunal (Annonaceae), is a larval host for the zebra swallowtail , Eurytides marcellus , throughout much of its range

Blue Ridge Discovery Center blog: Connections: The Pawpaw Tree and the Zebra Swallowtail Butterfly

A pair of survivors
The Zebra Swallowtail butterfly and the Common Pawpaw tree have been through a lot together.
If you see one of these distinctive long-tailed butterflies glide past, it's likely there's a pawpaw patch nearby.
The Zebra Swallowtail, Eurytides marcellus, is the only species of the genus Eurytides (the kite swallowtails)
that makes its home in the temperate zones of North America. Other species from this genus live in subtropical zones.
The sole source of food for the Zebra Swallowtail's caterpillars is the foliage, particularly the young leaves,
of trees in the genus Asimina, the pawpaws.
It happens that the Common Pawpaw, Asimina triloba, from the same family (Annonaceae) as the tropical custard apple and cherimoya,
is also the only of the Asimina genus that is able to grow in this region of temperate North America,
suggesting that the Zebra Swallowtails and the pawpaws have been co-evolving here since this region was very different than it is today.

Sources

• http://bugguide.net/node/view/3101 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9917274
• www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Eurytides-marcellus
• www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2307/1938808
  
• www.ars-grin.gov/cor/minor/asiinfo.html
• http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=2752
• http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/lawson.html
• www.dof.virginia.gov/trees/pawpaw.htm
  
• Barlow, Connie. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms.