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Fwd: Vladimir Nabokov,
who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a Butterfly" ...
who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a Butterfly" ...
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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 07:39:08 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a
Butterfly" ...
------------------ Museum collecting butterfly experts, specimens
Daytona Beach News-Journal - Daytona,FL,USA
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/03NewsHEAD02ENV070605.htm[1]
Museum collecting butterfly experts, specimens
By VIRGINIA SMITH
Staff Writer
_Last update: July 06, 2005_
GAINESVILLE -- It's not often you run into a lepidopterist.
Butterfly scientists are rare even where you'd expect to encounter
them. New York's American Museum of Natural History recently locked
the door on its butterfly collection when its lepidopterist quit; the
Smithsonian, in Washington, no longer employs one to oversee its 2.5
million butterflies and moths, most of which are in remote
warehouses. The Los Angeles County museum laid off its butterfly guy
last year, and the British Museum in London -- which houses the
largest collection of butterflies to date -- has one lonesome
lepidopterist in charge of 8 million specimens.
At the Florida Natural History Museum, by contrast, you can hardly
go to the bathroom without tripping over a lepidopterist.
There's a lepidopterist in the museum's live butterfly forest,
explaining how morpho butterflies, those electric-blue beauties of
tropical America, will get drunk on fermenting bananas and fly all
funny.
In an upstairs office, husband-and-wife lepidopterists swoon over a
newly discovered species from Tajikistan in Central Asia. In the main
collection room, a British lepidopterist is labeling dozens of new
cabinets for his South American specimens.
One lepidopterist plays recordings of butterflies clicking at each
other -- "they're saying 'Get away from my flower, I'm bigger than
you!' " she explains -- and in a windowless room another is
flattening the wings of some 70 tiny moths he caught in his yard,
half of them unknown to science.
Altogether 40 people work curating butterflies and moths at the
museum's $12 million McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity,
which opened last year to great fanfare. Most of the fuss was about
the center's live butterfly exhibit, a screened-in rain forest where
monarchs and swallowtails ply the orchids and land on unsuspecting
children.
The exhibit is certainly impressive -- the museum buys $100,000
worth of farm-raised butterflies a year to stock it, and hires a
full-time horticulturist to make sure its plants are lush and lovely.
But behind the scenes, something more astounding is happening. The
McGuire Center is quietly, steadily gobbling up the world's stocks of
dead butterflies from museums, private collectors and universities.
It's sending scientists into the dark heart of Papua New Guinea to
bring back more. It's hiring lepidopterists away from elite
institutions, turning its spacious, light-filled offices into a sort
of butterfly Versailles. Semitrailers of butterflies are arriving.
Within three years, the Florida museum will eclipse the British
Museum with more than 8 million butterflies, becoming the world's
biggest collection. Within the next two decades, it expects to house
a stupefying 23 million.
You may rightly be wondering: Why?
ONE ALWAYS NEEDS MORE
Last week a group of lepidopterists pondered the question, "When is
enough enough?" They started to mumble and look uncomfortable.
"Never," said McGuire Center director Thomas Emmel, who sported a
butterfly tie.
"Well, sometimes there's damage or some mildew," said John Heppner,
a curator for the state's butterfly collection, housed down the road
from the McGuire Center. "In that case, we might throw a specimen
out."
"Telling a taxonomist to throw something out is kind of like asking
him to kill his firstborn," said Wayne Dixon, the state's chief
entomologist.
In the hallway behind Emmel, Heppner and Dixon were stacked
thousands of sleek new wood-and-glass cases, handmade by an Alachua
County carpenter and his assistants. Their contract, Emmel said,
should last at least six more years.
The moths and butterflies in the state's 90-year old collection, all
1.85 million of them, were in the process of being transferred to the
McGuire Center. The process involves removing them from their old
wooden cases, placing them in the new cases, trucking 900 of those
cases at a time to the center and freezing them in a giant walk-in
freezer at minus-40 degrees for three days, to kill any potential
pests (the biggest threats to dead butterflies are their live
relatives).
"It's a judicious decision," concluded Emmel. "If you have a hundred
of one species from every locality, do you need more? Probably not. On
the other hand, there are some species groups where the individuals
are similar and it's only belatedly that someone realizes there might
be a half-dozen species. Then you only have a handful of each."
DNA work can be done on any dead butterfly, he noted, no matter how
old.
Unlike with other types of animals, collecting insects for science
seldom makes a dent in their populations. Plus, Dixon said, if there
hadn't been lots of dead butterflies to work with in the 1840s, no
one would have learned that famous high school lesson in natural
selection -- about how black moths started to outnumber white ones
during the Industrial Revolution, camouflaging themselves on sooty
trees.
Studying butterflies isn't merely about butterflies, Emmel
explained. Dead, they can be used for a number of purposes. "If you
have samples of butterflies from every 10 years of a century and
tested for mercury, you could track pollution changes across the
country."
Living, they can be used to study evolution, molecular biology,
conservation, genetics, you name it.
Emmel and his colleagues pioneered the successful reintroduction of
the Miami blue butterfly, and universities in Britain and the United
States have made butterflies their critter of choice for a vast array
of experiments.
One butterfly caterpillar even hosts the AIDS virus, allowing
doctors to test drugs in a living organism. "In the last 20 years
we've found butterflies to be this perfect organism to follow
around," Emmel said, "mark with a pen and study the population size,
look at the chromosomes, the physiological effects on wing
development, and look at populations in response to climate change."
'GODFATHER TO AN INSECT'
Yet many lepidopterists like to look at butterflies, simple as that.
Lepidoptery has always been viewed as a gentleman's science, not for
the macho but the sensitive and fastidious. In 19th-century England,
its practitioners were often clergy and wealthy landowners, who
collected native butterflies in their countryside and paid others to
travel to the ends of the earth for exotic ones.
The field has always attracted dedicated amateurs of an educated,
well-to-do sort -- perhaps the most famous being Vladimir Nabokov,
who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a Butterfly": I found it and
named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to
an insect and its first describer -- and I want no other fame.
There are an estimated 265,000 species of butterflies and moths in
the world -- and only 100,000 have so far been named. That makes the
odds of discovering one pretty good for an informed amateur. And many
of these amateurs, apparently, find it fun and relaxing to flatten
butterflies and label them in microscopic script.
Emmel, author of 35 books on butterflies, has named hundreds of
species -- but so has his brother, a physician. Many of the doctors
and engineers and businesspeople who have donated or willed their
collections to the McGuire Center are godparents to umpteen insects.
One of the center's founding donations came from the collection of
the late Arthur Allyn, a former owner of the Chicago White Sox and
amateur lepidopterist extraordinaire.
The ultimate godparents are William and Nadine McGuire, the
Minnesota couple who donated more than $7 million (and 30,000
butterflies) to the center. Where most natural history museums focus
on keeping their public exhibits open, the McGuire contributions have
made the center flush enough to do things that natural history museums
have scarcely tried since the turn of the century -- like launch
massive collecting trips to the ends of the earth.
In August, two center lepidopterists, aided by 24 native porters,
will canoe and walk for a month into remotest New Guinea, setting up
lights in the forest and coming home, Emmel hopes, with a good
thousand new species.
If, that is, they prevail over the poisonous sea snakes, saltwater
crocodiles, land leeches, malaria and occasionally unfriendly
natives.
LABOR OF LOVE
State-of-the-art as the McGuire Center is, with its thick,
hurricane-proof design and underground generator and electron
microscopes and databases, it carries on some very old arts.
The methods for preparing butterflies have scarcely changed in
centuries.
Unlike with beetles, you can't just stick a pin in a butterfly and
close the drawer. Last week Lorraine Duerden, a recent University of
Florida graduate and employee of the center, was gingerly testing the
wing of one to see if it was flexible.
Butterflies stiffen after death, and to properly pin them, their
wing muscles must be relaxed in a humid chamber for awhile. Too short
a time and the butterfly will break when its wings are spread; too
long, and it will mold. After being spread, the wings must be tamped
down for days with paper and pins.
Duerden wore a jacket over her shoulders -- butterfly collections
are kept at a crisp 62 degrees. Through a wide window, museum patrons
watched her long and delicate fingers at work. Children stared, making
nose-steam on the glass.
Some butterflies, Emmel explained, have been put away for hundreds
of years without being spread, yet they can still be relaxed into
position. Duerden, he said, is not a lepidopterist but an incredibly
talented preparer.
"She's been spreading specimens collected by African missionaries in
the last century," and might someday spread one collected by Charles
Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace, he said. "We trust her with the most
valuable specimens."
Duerden, who was a photography major, said she had considered
lepidoptery but rejected it.
"I feel guilty about killing them," she said.
"Every butterfly we kill is for science," Emmel said.
_virginia.smith_@news-jrnl.com[2]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/03NewsHEAD02ENV070605.htm
[2] mailto:virginia.smith@news-jrnl.com
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 07:39:08 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a
Butterfly" ...
------------------ Museum collecting butterfly experts, specimens
Daytona Beach News-Journal - Daytona,FL,USA
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/03NewsHEAD02ENV070605.htm[1]
Museum collecting butterfly experts, specimens
By VIRGINIA SMITH
Staff Writer
_Last update: July 06, 2005_
GAINESVILLE -- It's not often you run into a lepidopterist.
Butterfly scientists are rare even where you'd expect to encounter
them. New York's American Museum of Natural History recently locked
the door on its butterfly collection when its lepidopterist quit; the
Smithsonian, in Washington, no longer employs one to oversee its 2.5
million butterflies and moths, most of which are in remote
warehouses. The Los Angeles County museum laid off its butterfly guy
last year, and the British Museum in London -- which houses the
largest collection of butterflies to date -- has one lonesome
lepidopterist in charge of 8 million specimens.
At the Florida Natural History Museum, by contrast, you can hardly
go to the bathroom without tripping over a lepidopterist.
There's a lepidopterist in the museum's live butterfly forest,
explaining how morpho butterflies, those electric-blue beauties of
tropical America, will get drunk on fermenting bananas and fly all
funny.
In an upstairs office, husband-and-wife lepidopterists swoon over a
newly discovered species from Tajikistan in Central Asia. In the main
collection room, a British lepidopterist is labeling dozens of new
cabinets for his South American specimens.
One lepidopterist plays recordings of butterflies clicking at each
other -- "they're saying 'Get away from my flower, I'm bigger than
you!' " she explains -- and in a windowless room another is
flattening the wings of some 70 tiny moths he caught in his yard,
half of them unknown to science.
Altogether 40 people work curating butterflies and moths at the
museum's $12 million McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity,
which opened last year to great fanfare. Most of the fuss was about
the center's live butterfly exhibit, a screened-in rain forest where
monarchs and swallowtails ply the orchids and land on unsuspecting
children.
The exhibit is certainly impressive -- the museum buys $100,000
worth of farm-raised butterflies a year to stock it, and hires a
full-time horticulturist to make sure its plants are lush and lovely.
But behind the scenes, something more astounding is happening. The
McGuire Center is quietly, steadily gobbling up the world's stocks of
dead butterflies from museums, private collectors and universities.
It's sending scientists into the dark heart of Papua New Guinea to
bring back more. It's hiring lepidopterists away from elite
institutions, turning its spacious, light-filled offices into a sort
of butterfly Versailles. Semitrailers of butterflies are arriving.
Within three years, the Florida museum will eclipse the British
Museum with more than 8 million butterflies, becoming the world's
biggest collection. Within the next two decades, it expects to house
a stupefying 23 million.
You may rightly be wondering: Why?
ONE ALWAYS NEEDS MORE
Last week a group of lepidopterists pondered the question, "When is
enough enough?" They started to mumble and look uncomfortable.
"Never," said McGuire Center director Thomas Emmel, who sported a
butterfly tie.
"Well, sometimes there's damage or some mildew," said John Heppner,
a curator for the state's butterfly collection, housed down the road
from the McGuire Center. "In that case, we might throw a specimen
out."
"Telling a taxonomist to throw something out is kind of like asking
him to kill his firstborn," said Wayne Dixon, the state's chief
entomologist.
In the hallway behind Emmel, Heppner and Dixon were stacked
thousands of sleek new wood-and-glass cases, handmade by an Alachua
County carpenter and his assistants. Their contract, Emmel said,
should last at least six more years.
The moths and butterflies in the state's 90-year old collection, all
1.85 million of them, were in the process of being transferred to the
McGuire Center. The process involves removing them from their old
wooden cases, placing them in the new cases, trucking 900 of those
cases at a time to the center and freezing them in a giant walk-in
freezer at minus-40 degrees for three days, to kill any potential
pests (the biggest threats to dead butterflies are their live
relatives).
"It's a judicious decision," concluded Emmel. "If you have a hundred
of one species from every locality, do you need more? Probably not. On
the other hand, there are some species groups where the individuals
are similar and it's only belatedly that someone realizes there might
be a half-dozen species. Then you only have a handful of each."
DNA work can be done on any dead butterfly, he noted, no matter how
old.
Unlike with other types of animals, collecting insects for science
seldom makes a dent in their populations. Plus, Dixon said, if there
hadn't been lots of dead butterflies to work with in the 1840s, no
one would have learned that famous high school lesson in natural
selection -- about how black moths started to outnumber white ones
during the Industrial Revolution, camouflaging themselves on sooty
trees.
Studying butterflies isn't merely about butterflies, Emmel
explained. Dead, they can be used for a number of purposes. "If you
have samples of butterflies from every 10 years of a century and
tested for mercury, you could track pollution changes across the
country."
Living, they can be used to study evolution, molecular biology,
conservation, genetics, you name it.
Emmel and his colleagues pioneered the successful reintroduction of
the Miami blue butterfly, and universities in Britain and the United
States have made butterflies their critter of choice for a vast array
of experiments.
One butterfly caterpillar even hosts the AIDS virus, allowing
doctors to test drugs in a living organism. "In the last 20 years
we've found butterflies to be this perfect organism to follow
around," Emmel said, "mark with a pen and study the population size,
look at the chromosomes, the physiological effects on wing
development, and look at populations in response to climate change."
'GODFATHER TO AN INSECT'
Yet many lepidopterists like to look at butterflies, simple as that.
Lepidoptery has always been viewed as a gentleman's science, not for
the macho but the sensitive and fastidious. In 19th-century England,
its practitioners were often clergy and wealthy landowners, who
collected native butterflies in their countryside and paid others to
travel to the ends of the earth for exotic ones.
The field has always attracted dedicated amateurs of an educated,
well-to-do sort -- perhaps the most famous being Vladimir Nabokov,
who wrote in the poem "On Discovering a Butterfly": I found it and
named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to
an insect and its first describer -- and I want no other fame.
There are an estimated 265,000 species of butterflies and moths in
the world -- and only 100,000 have so far been named. That makes the
odds of discovering one pretty good for an informed amateur. And many
of these amateurs, apparently, find it fun and relaxing to flatten
butterflies and label them in microscopic script.
Emmel, author of 35 books on butterflies, has named hundreds of
species -- but so has his brother, a physician. Many of the doctors
and engineers and businesspeople who have donated or willed their
collections to the McGuire Center are godparents to umpteen insects.
One of the center's founding donations came from the collection of
the late Arthur Allyn, a former owner of the Chicago White Sox and
amateur lepidopterist extraordinaire.
The ultimate godparents are William and Nadine McGuire, the
Minnesota couple who donated more than $7 million (and 30,000
butterflies) to the center. Where most natural history museums focus
on keeping their public exhibits open, the McGuire contributions have
made the center flush enough to do things that natural history museums
have scarcely tried since the turn of the century -- like launch
massive collecting trips to the ends of the earth.
In August, two center lepidopterists, aided by 24 native porters,
will canoe and walk for a month into remotest New Guinea, setting up
lights in the forest and coming home, Emmel hopes, with a good
thousand new species.
If, that is, they prevail over the poisonous sea snakes, saltwater
crocodiles, land leeches, malaria and occasionally unfriendly
natives.
LABOR OF LOVE
State-of-the-art as the McGuire Center is, with its thick,
hurricane-proof design and underground generator and electron
microscopes and databases, it carries on some very old arts.
The methods for preparing butterflies have scarcely changed in
centuries.
Unlike with beetles, you can't just stick a pin in a butterfly and
close the drawer. Last week Lorraine Duerden, a recent University of
Florida graduate and employee of the center, was gingerly testing the
wing of one to see if it was flexible.
Butterflies stiffen after death, and to properly pin them, their
wing muscles must be relaxed in a humid chamber for awhile. Too short
a time and the butterfly will break when its wings are spread; too
long, and it will mold. After being spread, the wings must be tamped
down for days with paper and pins.
Duerden wore a jacket over her shoulders -- butterfly collections
are kept at a crisp 62 degrees. Through a wide window, museum patrons
watched her long and delicate fingers at work. Children stared, making
nose-steam on the glass.
Some butterflies, Emmel explained, have been put away for hundreds
of years without being spread, yet they can still be relaxed into
position. Duerden, he said, is not a lepidopterist but an incredibly
talented preparer.
"She's been spreading specimens collected by African missionaries in
the last century," and might someday spread one collected by Charles
Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace, he said. "We trust her with the most
valuable specimens."
Duerden, who was a photography major, said she had considered
lepidoptery but rejected it.
"I feel guilty about killing them," she said.
"Every butterfly we kill is for science," Emmel said.
_virginia.smith_@news-jrnl.com[2]
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/03NewsHEAD02ENV070605.htm
[2] mailto:virginia.smith@news-jrnl.com
----- End forwarded message -----