WINNIPEG -- The Assiniboine Park Conservancy is taking steps towards saving an endangered butterfly species from extinction.

On Monday, it announced the release of 19 Poweshiek skipperling butterflies at the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in the R.M. of Stuartburn, Man.

This comes after the team bred and raised the butterflies at the Assiniboine Park Zoo.

“Poweshiek skipperling are one of the most endangered animals on the entire planet. Most people haven’t heard of them before, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important,” said Laura Burns, research conservation specialist for Assiniboine Park Conservancy.

“We’re lucky to still have some in Manitoba, but they’re really on the brink of extinction.”

Currently, the Poweshiek skipperling, a small grassland butterfly, can only be found in two locations: Manitoba’s Tall Grass Prairie Preserve and another site near Flint, Mich.

“Every summer we catch female adult Poweshiek skipperling butterflies, we bring them to the zoo and we let them lay eggs here. So once the eggs hatch into caterpillars, we raise those caterpillars for almost an entire year, until they become adults the next year. So they have a full, one-year lifecycle,” Burns said.

She noted that they don’t migrate like Monarchs, so they freeze solid during the Manitoba winters. Burns said in order to emulate this freezing, they put the butterflies in a special freezer at the zoo.

“In the spring, we wake them up. They’re still caterpillars, they eat grass. And then when they become chrysalises, we take them back to the wild. And when they emerge from their chrysalis, we let them go and find their mate and continue the population in the wild,” she said.

According to the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, experts say there could be fewer than 500 butterflies from this species left in the world.

Burns noted it’s estimated there’s about 100-200 Poweshiek skipperlings left specifically in Manitoba.

“That’s so few Poweshiek that we are worried they can’t find each other and they can’t spread to different sites on their own so there numbers just aren’t getting what they need to be to persist,” she said, noting 20 years ago there could be up to 1,000 Poweshiek in the country.

The conservancy noted butterflies are especially sensitive to changes in their environments, so the loss of much of the tall grass prairie has resulted in the decline of the Poweshiek skipperling butterfly.

“The reason they’re endangered is a really tough question and we’re working with partners in the U.S. and Canada to try and figure out what happened,” Burns said. “There’s no clear cut reason that this happened. There was a really dramatic decline about 20 years ago. All of a sudden over the course of four years, they had almost vanished. And they had been lost from almost every state that you could find them in the U.S.”

Burns said some of the hypotheses include climate change, pesticide risks and a loss of habitat.

The conservancy is also working to sequence and analyze the genome of the Poweshiek skipperling butterfly to fully understand the decline of the species.

“Biodiversity of plant and animal life is incredibly important and the loss of one species can have a ripple effect that spells disaster within a specialized ecosystem,” Burns said in a news release.

“The knowledge we are gaining by studying the Poweshiek skipperling could prove to be invaluable for other grassland species.”

This conservation project is a collaboration between the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Minnesota Zoo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the University of Winnipeg.

In 2018, six butterflies were released, followed by 13 butterflies in 2019.