High school students help butterflies
Butterfly populations are on a downward spiral but a group of high-schoolers in Wellington’s Hutt Valley are doing their bit to provide them with havens.
Hutt Valley High School year 13 students Dominik Hargraves, 18, Alex Hamilton, 17, Dillan Liang, 17, and Khoa Le, 17, have designed a starter kit for gardeners to create a mini-sanctuary for monarch butterflies in their own backyards.
Their mission was to promote awareness of the decline in the butterfly population, and make gardens good places for butterflies to live by bringing their favourite plants into one place.
The box ‘‘perfectly embodied the characteristics of a product our group was willing to sell’’, Hargraves said.
Their class required students to partner with the Young Enterprise Trust to make their dream product a reality.
‘‘It allows the monarch to lay eggs on the swan plant while being attracted by colourful flowers which it uses to pollinate.’’
The boxes contain two swan plant seeds, two wildflower seeds, four compostable pots, soil, some soil pellets – donated by Bunnings, and when put with water, expanded into extra soil for the kits – and instructions.
Young Enterprise had donated $100 to the students for materials, and the first batch of 24 boxes had originally been planned for release in June, but delayed a month by Covid-19.
They hoped to sell 200 boxes, a reduction on their original goal of 500, and their mission to spread awareness had taken them to Facebook, where the responses were resoundingly positive.
‘‘We had over 190 responses in 72 hours,’’ Hargraves said. ‘‘People were saying, ‘sign me up’, and ‘what a good idea’.’’
Jacqui Knight, a founding member of the Monarch Butterfly New Zealand Trust, had ‘‘major concerns about our butterflies’’, and the decline in their populations stemmed from a lack of awareness.
People needed to plant more habitat, and use less pesticide, she said. ‘‘People think the environment is a specialist subject, and it’s not. We’re all a part of it.’’