Atala Butterflies use Coontie as their host plant. The butterflies remain in their area, and need a dozen or more plants in your yard or butterfly garden to survive as a colony, unless your neighbor has enough to make up the difference.

Those two Coontie plants are young and green and uneaten. They look great. If you're planting Coontie for butterflies, they won't look that way for long, so plant them behind some other pretty plant. Then you won't mind as much when these red and yellow caterpillars nibble on the leaves. These are Atala Butterfly Caterpillars.

 Atala Butterflies have black wings with a few patches of blue scales (yes, butterfly wings are covered in tiny scales) and a bright red abdomen.

White dots on your Coonite might be butterfly eggs like these:

 ...and white dots on your Coontie plants might be something else. Let's look at the other creatures I've found on Coontie, like these scale bugs.

The brown circle and white fuzz are scale. The long bug on the bottom right is a ladybug larva. When scale attacks a plant, ladybugs often lay eggs nearby so their young can eat the scale.

 I was concerned about disappearing caterpillars when I noticed this Cuban Knight Anole that seemed to be watching the last two caterpillars on the plant.

Correlation does not equal causation, and I did not actually see the green lizard eat the caterpillars, but they were gone the next day and there wasn't a butterfly chrysalis in sight. The plump lizard looked quite content and well fed though.

Knight anole's have teeth, and they aren't afraid to use them. This smaller green lizard, a green anole, is a sweeter little creature.

Green anoles just pinch a little when they bite, which is unlikely unless you're quick enough to grab one - also unlikely. The knight anole's are larger than green anoles, they have sharp little teeth, and they have yellow on their cheeks, while the green anoles do not.

I usually see the butterflies lay their eggs on the underside of the most tender new Coontie leaves, but when all of the leaves are nibbled, they'll lay their eggs on the Coontie seed cones as well:

Atala Butterflies use Coontie as their Host Plant. They only lay eggs on Coontie. This Tersa Sphinx Moth just used it for a brief resting place:

This bug nymph was also looking for food on the Coontie plants:

Coontie (Zamia floridana, or Zamia pumila) has an interesting history.  It was harvested for food (don't try this at home, the root is poisonous without proper processing to remove a water soluble toxin, and besides, the butterflies need it), and so much of it was removed that the Atala was thought to be extinct when they made the endangered species list.