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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. | |
