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Florida Butterfly Museum & the writer Vladimir Nabokov ...
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From: Sandy P. Klein
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Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 4:53 AM
Subject: among their ranks the writer Vladimir Nabokov ...
Winged collection spans the globe
August 11, 2004
GAINESVILLE ╥ An insect with wings as much as a foot wide, the Atlas moth usually makes its home in Southeast Asia. But scientists expect soon to see it here. Ditto the blue morpho, a lapis-colored butterfly found in South and Central America. And the...
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-pbutterfly11aug11,0,2475778.story
Winged collection spans the globe
By Jennifer Peltz
Staff Writer
Posted August 11 2004
GAINESVILLE ╥ An insect with wings as much as a foot wide, the Atlas moth usually makes its home in Southeast Asia. But scientists expect soon to see it here.
Ditto the blue morpho, a lapis-colored butterfly found in South and Central America. And the archduke, the common sailor, the Grecian shoemaker and the small postman.
Intended to feature 2,000 of these and other colorful characters, the Butterfly Rainforest opening Saturday at the Florida Museum of Natural History is undoubtedly impressive, if not the biggest exhibit of its kind. Coconut Creek's Butterfly World, for instance, displays about 7,000.
But the Gainesville museum's trump card lies in what visitors see after the three-story man-made rain forest: a glimpse of what is being billed as the most extensive butterfly and moth research operation in the world.
The University of Florida-linked museum plans to recruit a dozen full-time researchers and curators. It eventually expects 30 or more graduate students and boasts a research collection of 4.5 million specimens -- for now.
The museum says the research collection is already the biggest in the country, second worldwide only to the 8.5 million or more in London's Natural History Museum. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which is about three-quarters of the way through a hand count, expects to finish with about 2.6 million. The American Museum of Natural History, in New York, estimates it has at least 2 million.
The Florida museum has built room for 20 million, aiming to become the world's pre-eminent repository for Lepidoptera, the scientific title for butterflies and moths.
In scholarly circles, the $12 million McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity -- underwritten mainly by Minnesota health-care executive Dr. William McGuire and his wife, Nadine -- is as eye-catching as its winged subjects. Few other institutions count more than a couple of moth and butterfly specialists, and many universities have cut back support for natural-history collections in recent years, researchers say.
As Norman Platnick, an American Museum of Natural History curator, puts it, the McGuire Center is "very well-positioned to make a big splash."
McGuire Center researchers characterize it as a resource for investigating a range of scientific questions and for building public interest in investigating them.
"Lepidoptera are important ecologically, economically, educationally, conservation-wise, medically, culturally," said Thomas Emmel, a longtime UF butterfly researcher heading the effort. "We can admire them in all their ephemeral beauty ... and they're also inspiring on a scientific level."
From origins dated to the time of the dinosaurs, moths and butterflies have diversified into an estimated 265,000 species, found everywhere from tropical rain forests to the Himalayas. Florida alone counts almost 3,000 species.
Caterpillars can be ravenous agricultural pests, but adult butterflies play an important role in pollinating plants. To people, they're generally harmless and often inspirational. Butterflies have winged their way into art, mythology and literature. Lepidopterists count among their ranks the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who explored his fascination with butterflies in both novels and scientific journals.
Lepidopterans also have netted themselves a prominent place in science, contributing to research on AIDS vaccines, anti-cancer drugs and genetics. Scientists' understanding of genes that control butterfly wing patterns led to crucial discoveries in combating Rh-incompatibility, a blood disease that once caused 10,000 or more infant deaths and stillbirths a year in the United States. In recent years, butterflies have become poster children for conservation. Scientists say they can act as brightly colored warning signs of changing climates, disappearing habitats and what many consider dire threats to biodiversity, or the range of life on earth. Some scientists see shifts in the west-coast range of the Edith's checkerspot butterfly, for instance, as evidence of global warming.
Researchers look for those shifts in specimen collections like the Florida museum's. The specimens so far come chiefly from collections the museum and state already owned but held in various places. The Florida museum's butterfly exhibit gives visitors a good look at the underlying science through windows on the collection and working labs. Its researchers emphasize that most lepidopterists started out as kids with butterfly nets, and that many significant discoveries and collections were the work of amateurs.
"[We want] to be sort of an inspiration to people to realize that research doesn't take place behind closed doors ... and science doesn't necessarily take place in a dry, stuffy old lab," Assistant Director Jaret Daniels said on a recent day, shortly after releasing into the rain forest 100 butterflies from eight Florida species. In a lab next door, future monarch butterflies awaited in jewel-like cocoons, while newly emerged ones dried their wings.
Given lepidopterans' short life spans, the museum expects to need about 900 butterflies a week to keep the rain forest stocked. Most will be bought and flown in from butterfly farms around the world, a plan Emmel sees as providing incentives for creating and preserving butterfly habitat. Admission fees will help cover the $700,000-a-year cost of maintaining the exhibit, he said.
The McGuires gave $7.2 million to build the exhibit and research facilities, with the state adding $4.2 million. William McGuire, a physician and the chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, also is a published lepidopterist.
He said he was impressed with the work Emmel and others were doing at UF, intrigued by the idea of merging existing state and museum collections and driven to draw public attention to biodiversity through one of its most appealing symbols.
"Think of butterflies not just as pretty things," McGuire said. "That's a way to get people in the door, so to speak. But I think there's a lot more meaning than that."
Jennifer Peltz can be reached at jpeltz@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6636.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel