Austin, Texas, is home to about 170 species of butterflies. It is also the home of the Austin Butterfly Forum, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to butterfly conservation and to enriching people's lives through butterflies. The Austin Butterfly Forum is a club that organizes field trips, conducts butterfly counts, promotes native gardening, performs conservation activities, and meets monthly for an educational presentation. We are a community of butterfly enthusiasts who also enjoy dragonflies & damselflies, bees, beetles, spiders and arthropods in general, and our meeting presentations span this gamut as well. Join Us!

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Tawny Crazy Ant, photo by Edward LeBrun

Meetings are held in the Zilker Garden Center, 2220 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, TX, 78746 at 7:00 PM on the fourth Monday of each month except December.

Feb. 25, 2019, 7 PM meeting: Tawny crazy ants and their microsporidian pathogens: the biology of an invasion and the prospects for its control, presented by Edward LeBrun, Ph.D.

Tawny crazy ants are an environmentally damaging invasive species introduced from South America. These ants are currently spreading throughout the Gulf Coast region of the United States including Travis County. In this talk I will describe some of the basic biology and ecology of this invader, its impacts upon the natural systems it invades, its interaction with the current regionally dominant invasive ant, imported fire ants, and ongoing work towards sustainable control of this ant’s populations in natural environments.

I am a Research Scientist in UT’s Department of Integrative Biology based out of the Brackenridge Field Laboratory. I did my PhD work at the University of Utah working on ant community ecology. I have been working on invasive ants and their natural enemies in South America, Texas, and California since 2004.

Mar. 25, 2019, 7 PM meeting: TBA

Membership

All of our normal events are open to the public, but you may want to become a member of the Austin Butterfly Forum to help support us and our events. We also treat members to some extra goodies, such as reduced admission to special programs that have a fee and discounts on purchases made at meetings. Membership is $20 annually per household payable during meetings or by mail to Doris Hill, ABF Treasurer, 1605 Broadmoor, Austin, TX 78723.

For more information, please contact Mike Quinn, ABF president at 512-577-0250 or

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