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[Fwd: We are reminded of former curator Vladimir Nabokov's work
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Subject: We are reminded of former curator Vladimir Nabokov's work ...
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 22:14:01 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
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http://www.harvard-magazine.com/archive/01jf/jf01_dept_treasure.html
[Treasure]
Show-offs
What a life cycle -- from caterpillar to the ultra chic
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Photographs by Jim Harrison
Once out of the chrysalis, most butterflies live for only a few days or
weeks. Cheerful observers might conceive that the several hundred
thousand butterflies preserved at Harvard have life everlasting (more or
less). A thousand are on display into March at the Harvard Museum of
Natural History. The collection as a whole is a research treasure. The
representatives shown here, from Beauty on the Wing: The Double Lives of
Butterflies, by no means include the greatest rarities. As to their
beauty, they caught the eye of Harvard Magazine's photographer, but who
can pick the fairest in the land?
Lepidoptera is a large order of at least 160,000 species, but only
18,000 are butterflies, in five families; the rest are moths. The
exhibit artfully arranges related family members in five large vertical
cases on a dazzling wall of butterflies. Shown on this page are
brushfoots--including a species of Callicore whose hindwing seems to say
89--and swallowtails.
The exhibit is richly multifaceted. (For more about it, please see the
magazine's website: www.harvard-magazine.com.) We are shown live ants
tending caterpillars and may listen to the "singing" of the caterpillars
recorded in the laboratory of Naomi Pierce, Ph.D. '83, Hessel professor
of biology and curator of lepidoptera--pupal calls, larval grunts and
hisses. We are reminded of former curator Vladimir Nabokov's work on the
genitalia of blues. We admire a 35-million-year-old fossil butterfly. We
push buttons to see why the iridescent morpho at lower right looks dull
brown when lighted from behind and why when he flies through a jungle
clearing, his "blue wings seem to flash on and off in the sunlight like
a neon light." We read a handwritten note from a butterfly broker who
sold the green birdwing at left, from Papua New Guinea, to the museum
around 1900. "Carl v. Hagen who took this pair was afterwards eaten by
the Papuans & the only thing he left his wife was about four pairs of
these....I think you will agree you get them cheap for £14-10-0."
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