An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Sharman Apt Russell Perseus Publishing, 2003; $24.00

Butterflies, as nature writer Sharman Russell aptly observes, can be practically invisible at times, as though they inhabited a separate dimension; they flutter among us in full view and yet we scarcely notice them. She's right. I can distinguish a robin from a blue jay, a crow from a sparrow (and even, like Hamlet, "a hawk from a handsaw"), but I couldn't identify a single one of the ninety-three common species of butterflies Russell lists in the preface to this slender collection of essays. If my experience is any measure, many people probably regard butterflies as elements of the landscape, flashes of color no more distinctive than a dropping leaf or a flower petal floating on the wind.

From a butterfly's point of view, that is all to the good; a typical member of the order Lepidoptera devotes its brief life to being neither noticed nor eaten before it mates and produces its young. To Russell, however, that is a pity. An acute awareness of butterflies, which she developed after a brief encounter with a swallowtail in New Mexico, has convinced her that butterflies add a luminous dimension to one's life.

Obsessive butterfly collectors, the subject of her title essay, can take this pleasure to extremes. Take Lord Walter Rothschild, a quintessential Victorian eccentric: Over a lifetime of collecting, with the help of professional collectors, he amassed 2.25 million specimens. Rothschild's collection resides in the Natural History Museum in London, along with six million other butterflies and moths collectors have added over the years. Or take Vladimir Nabokov, the most famous of the bunch: not only did he insert allusions to butterflies throughout his fiction, he also wrote twenty-two scientific papers on members of the order, and discovered several new species.

Russell's obsession is more benign: she collects facts and stories about butterflies and then writes about them with grace and good humor. Did you know that most butterflies have taste buds on their feet, and "eyes"--light-sensitive cells--on their genitalia? That the caterpillars of the Panamanian metalmark butterfly secrete an intoxicating fluid they exchange with ants in return for protection from wasps? Can you appreciate the endurance of the male and female queen butterflies, which are locked in coitus for as long as eight hours at a time (a sizable fraction of their active lifespan)? Does it seem amazing that, during a migration of snout butterflies in September 1921, many millions crossed a 250-mile-long corridor between San Marcos, Texas, and the Rio Grande River each minute, for eighteen solid days--tens of billions of insects in all?

There are lessons to be learned from this assortment of lepidopteran lore. Many of the oddities of butterfly life are Darwinian adaptations to a harsh world in which birds and insects are looking for a handy afternoon snack. Colorful bands on a butterfly's wing provide camouflage among leaves and flowers, of course, but they can also divert a predator's eye toward the butterfly's tail, where a little bite won't matter as much as a chomp on the head. Some markings mimic the eyes of creatures frightening to predators; other markings, common among "sweet-tasting" species, mimic the patterns of unrelated butterflies that birds know to be "bitter."

Overall, however, Russell's lyrical stories appeal to our aesthetic, rather than to our moral, sensibilities. We don't ask what lessons we learn from a Mozart concerto; nor should we ask more of butterflies. Better to enjoy them, not for their utility, but for their quirkiness and their beauty. She quotes Miriam Rothschild, niece of the great Victorian collector, who viewed them, not with the eyes of a professional entomologist (which she was) but as "dream flowers--childhood dreams--which have broken loose from their stalks and escaped into the sunshine."

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the WK. T Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.