In fine fighting fettle, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum has marshaled squads of exotic fliers never before seen in these parts to compete in Chicago’s burgeoning butterfly wars.
In the beat of a wing, it seems, a city that had no living-butterfly gardens suddenly has three.
To counter the competition, the Nature Museum recently refitted its butterfly habitat to allow it to display exotic species from all over the world, something the others can’t do.
To bring in the foreign species, the museum had to alter the flower-bedecked atrium into a “scientific containment facility” that meets stringent federal standards, ensuring none of the alien butterflies can escape into the city.
When the Chicago Academy of Sciences started planning its new museum building at Cannon Drive and Fullerton Parkway a few years ago, the centerpiece for the Nature Museum was to be a soaring indoor butterfly haven.
It was something unusual, an exhibit where visitors walk in and not only enjoy the beauty of the fluttery insects, but more than likely have one or two land on their hand or shoulder.
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In 1998, however, a year before the Nature Museum opened, the Field Museum opened just such an exhibit of its own, albeit a temporary, summer-only one in a tent outside its south door. It proved so successful that the Field is building another tented butterfly house to open May 25.
If that isn’t enough butterflies for the Chicago area, on June 20, Brookfield Zoo is opening a summer butterfly haven of its own.
Butterflies, ephemeral and lovely, have suddenly become a big and complex business.
Why?
“They are really popular creatures with our visitors,” said Ariel Orlov, the Field Museum’s project manager who is overseeing its summertime butterfly exhibit.
“If you look at animals in a natural history museum, they are almost always dead and stuffed and behind glass,” she said. “If you go to a zoo to see living animals, they almost always are behind bars, separated from you physically.
“In a butterfly exhibit, you are allowed to completely interact with the animals. It is a lovely experience.”
That is something the Nature Museum has long recognized, but being a much smaller institution than the Field or Brookfield, it apparently felt it had to differentiate its butterflies from theirs.
Butterfly houses have blossomed all over the country since 1988, when the first two were built, one in Georgia, one in Florida. Almost all of them feature indigenous, North American butterflies. That is true of the Field and Brookfield exhibits planned for this summer.
New species span the globe
Until this week, the butterflies exhibited at the Nature Museum also always were drawn from the 750 species native to North America. Now, however, it will feature butterflies from all over the world.
“We’ll have blue morphos from South America,” said Joe Shacter, the museum’s president, “that can get to be six inches across. We’ll have rice paper and greater egg fly butterflies from Asia, and owl butterflies from Central America.
“We will rotate the exhibit with differing species every few weeks so that people can come in periodically and always see something different.
“Since the Butterfly Haven is our icon exhibit, we want to keep it special, and by bringing in species from around the world, we sort of like to think that makes our butterfly exhibit the best.”
Certainly it is the most secure one.
Nobody, after all, wants to be responsible for introducing another non-native bug to the local environment that might possibly wreak havoc like Asian longhorned beetles or gypsy moths.
“We are now, by scientific standards, a containment facility,” Shacter said.
“We had people in here, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, to redo the atrium architecturally to prevent any of our foreign butterflies from escaping.”
That meant building vestibules in the entry and exit doors with curtains of forced air that prevent the lightweight denizens from leaving the premises with visitors. The museum also screened off all the atrium ductwork and sealed up any other possible aperture leading outside.
“I don’t honestly believe that any of the species we will be showing could survive a Chicago winter if they did get outside,” said Doug Taron, the Nature Museum’s biology curator. “They are all coming from very hot, tropical climates.
“Even so, we will not allow the exotic [foreign] species to reproduce.”
`Birth control’ for butterflies
There being no known birth-control pills or prophylactics for butterflies, the museum staff stops reproduction simply by withholding plants that females normally would lay their eggs on.
“The females have to lay eggs on plants that are edible for caterpillars,” Taron said. “When the eggs hatch into caterpillars, they are sitting on their food.
“We avoid using any known host plants for caterpillars in our exhibit. We do that partially because the caterpillars would literally eat up the exhibit, leaving it looking pretty raggedy and unattractive.
“But it also stops unwanted reproduction. The females have chemical receptors in their forelegs, and they can sense when a plant has dangerous toxins. When they sense the toxins, they don’t lay the eggs, and eventually their bodies reabsorb the eggs.”
Though the museum is hard at work at breeding butterflies native to Illinois, especially rare and endangered species, it will never breed the foreign species. The museum buys those from dealers in the chrysalis, or pupa, stage and puts them on display so visitors can watch the often stunningly colorful butterflies emerge.
“One of the reasons butterfly exhibits have become so popular in recent years is that they lend themselves to showing the entire life cycle of an animal in a relatively small exhibit area,” said Amy Bodwell, Brookfield Zoo’s manager of public programs.
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“There are so many cool things about butterflies, and these exhibits allow people to think about smaller animals like the invertebrates. We walk on bugs, even stomp on some of them, but we depend so much on them, and butterflies tell that story so well.”
In fact, it has become a very popular story to tell all over the country. Almost every major city–and many smaller ones–has had a zoo or a museum put up a butterfly house in the last five years.
Moreover, releasing hosts of butterflies has become an increasingly popular public ritual, replacing rice-throwing at many weddings, and the release of festoons of balloons at supermarket and mall openings.
Trend takes off in England
Fifteen years ago, there was no such thing as a butterfly-breeding industry in this country. Now there is a booming one.
“It really began in England in the 1970s,” said Kraig Anderson, whose 10-year-old St. Paul exhibit business, Spineless Wonders, is installing Brookfield’s temporary butterfly house.
“They hit upon the optimal temperatures and humidities that various butterflies bred in, and they learned how to deal with diseases that most threatened butterflies. One by one, they got over the hurdles, and when it was possible to breed them on a large scale in captivity, the first butterfly exhibit house went up in [Dorset] England in 1978.”
The first one proved so popular, it was copied elsewhere in England and, a decade later, the idea migrated to the U.S.
Perhaps no city anywhere will have the concentration of captive butterflies that Chicago will have this summer (the Field’s closes Sept. 3, and Brookfield’s closes Sept. 16).
Though all three venues hope the butterflies will be big draws for their own institutions, the competition between them is not quite up to the level of Macy’s versus Gimbel’s.
“You can’t have too many butterflies,” Brookfield’s Bodwell said. “They are so attractive and non-threatening, and such a nice addition to the zoo, that I wish we had them year-round.
“In the winter, I just love going to the Nature Museum to stroll in the butterfly haven. Seeing butterflies is just simply good for the soul.”