Butterflies Behaving Badly?

[Maliboo]

Finally a thread I feel compelled to respond to!

My wife and I have been collecting and observing butterflies and moths for
about 30 year.  We don't buy specimens, all have full data, and you will find a
lot of "little brown moths" and micro's in the collection, which is also
probably the best survey anywhere of moths in the Santa Monica Mountains and
now Santa Barbara.

For their main summer exhibit this year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural
History (I am a trustee, Sandy is a docent) has featured a butterfly house
(which we helped to underwrite).  Quite simply, this has been the most popular
show the museum has ever staged.  It has even outdrawn dinosaur shows, and has
been a tremendous boost to museum membership.  Let's be realistic, not many
people are going to come just to see some dead, mounted specimens, even though
we have a fine exhibit focusing on plant/insect interactions.

I too have noticed that butterfly behaviors in a butterfly house do not always
match behaviors in the wild.  But since most people never observe any butterfly
behavior anywhere, we have made a lot of progress.  The exhibit has done more
to raise awareness of lepidoptera and entomology in this community than
anything I have seen anywhere.  I suspect this will be very valuable in
protecting our local Monarch overwintering sites from the depredations of
developers.

To attribute emotion or awareness to insects is a bit absurd, and the subject
of some future thread, not this one.  I would simply point out that in the
wild, most butterflies accomplish nothing more than being part of the food
chain.  The butterflies in the exhibit come from breeders, who raise them for
that purpose.  Think of it, an opportunity for an entomologist to actually make
a living from something other than spraying crops!

All in all, I believe the positives of the Butterfly exhibit vastly outweigh
the somewhat dubious negatives.  It may not be quite as good as getting tens of
thousands of people to take up collecting or observing, but have we ever made
progress in Santa Barbara for entomology and lepidoptera.

Paul Russell

 
Paul J. Russell

 
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