The ultimate collection
The McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity is a butterfly institute that is as overwhelming as its name.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published August 18, 2005
GAINESVILLE - Whenever modern life gets too fast for me, I like to drive north to see butterflies at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity on the University of Florida campus.
Butterflies never seem to be in a hurry. If the wind blows left, they fly left. If the breeze carries them right, they don't resist. Sometimes they act like they don't care where they end up, as long as they get to eat, have sex and rest.
Years ago, when I wanted to see cool butterflies, I'd visit the famous lepidopterist Tom Emmel at his lab near a cesspool on the UF campus. When I was lucky, I would find a parking place where my truck wouldn't get stuck in the mud. Emmel kept butterflies in held-together-by-bobby-pin greenhouses, hothouses, nurseries and buildings that could have been World War I barracks. I will take my butterflies however I find them, so I never minded visiting the lepidoptera slum. But I always was sure there had to be a better way.
Now there is. The new butterfly theme park, adjacent to the Florida Museum of Natural History, is the largest in North America and soon will house the most complete collection on earth.
The $12-million McGuire Center, which Emmel directs, opened last summer. It is home to 6-million mounted butterflies and dozens of scientists and graduate students who, happily, sport no pins through their bellies. But the "you gotta see it to believe it" showpiece is the Butterfly Rainforest. In a three-story screened atrium, in a forest of tropical vegetation that includes waterfalls, dwell about 2,000 live butterflies.
They flit and swoop, sip nectar, eat fruit and look for mates. Many are well-known Florida species such as the official state butterfly, the lovely zebra longwing. But many are stunning specimens from other lands that are so breathtakingly beautiful they will break your heart.
Or, if you are lucky, at least land on your nose.
Welcome to the real Magic Kingdom.
Like a moth to the flameTom Emmel enjoys movies, though not always for the usual reasons. While most of us nibbled our nails during the creepy Silence of the Lambs, Emmel was interested in the serial killer's fascination with the death's-head sphinx moth (Acherontia atrophes). Emmel is fascinated by them, too.
"The death's-head moth is so called because of the skull-like pattern on the thorax," he tells people. "I have seen many specimens in collections and also alive in both Africa and Germany."
Emmel has yet to see every species of butterfly and moth on the planet. After all, there are 265,000 known varieties, including 186 in Florida. But there is still time. He is only 63.
Born in Los Angeles, he collected his first butterfly, a western tigertail swallowtail, when he was 8. As an adolescent, he knew his butterflies the way other teens knew their hot rods. He got his doctorate from Stanford and joined the UF faculty in 1967. He has since written 395 scientific papers and published 35 books with more in the offing. Tolstoy needed 838 pages to tell the story of Anna Karenina; Emmel covers The Butterflies of California in a scant 800.
Tall, thin and bespectacled, he seems at first glance as fragile as a daddy longlegs. In fact he has slept under the stars and under mosquito netting in 40 countries on butterfly expeditions.
Not that he is opposed to luxury. He currently works in what has to be the grandest office on earth. When he gazes out the 50-foot window, he sees the butterflies in the rainforest.
"It's almost too distracting," he says. "Sometimes I have to work with my back to the window to get anything done. This place is my dream come true."
Emmel has known William McGuire, who donated more than $7-million for the butterfly center, for decades. A physician, McGuire is the CEO of United Healthcare and a passionate amateur lepidopterist. A few years ago, he got one look at Emmel's old butterfly lab next to the cesspool and opened his checkbook.
McGuire also helped fund Emmel's famous project to save the Schaus' swallowtail butterfly, which had vanished from most of South Florida because of habitat destruction and pesticides. In 1992, Emmel traveled to a small island in the Florida Keys to capture a few swallowtails, by then the rarest butterfly in North America, for a captive breeding program. Two months later, Hurricane Andrew roared across South Florida, flooding the island. But Emmel had those precious butterflies and eggs in Gainesville.
Today, the butterfly is still rare. But now it is found in a number of islands in the Keys and mainland Florida. During the past decade Emmel and his students have raised 26 generations of the swallowtail and released 2,500.
I accompanied Emmel on several of his expeditions to save the Schaus' swallowtail. It was summer, miserably hot, and so buggy on Upper Key Largo we had to wear netting. Even so, mosquitoes and deer flies ate us alive.
We never encountered any venomous coral snakes in the tropical forests of Crocodile Lake National Sanctuary, nor crocs, but we never stopped watching for them. We also avoided dawdling under poisonwood and manchineel trees. When it rains, water that drips off their leaves will blister the skin.
Despite the sweat, despite the snakes, biting flies and the vicious plants, Emmel was in heaven. He and his students were having a ball releasing the rare swallowtails.
Now he and his chief assistant, Jaret C. Daniels, are hoping to resurrect the Miami blue butterfly, which is hanging on for dear life at Bahia Honda State Park in the Keys.
At the McGuire Center, visitors can watch scientists work with Miami blues. No larger than a 25-cent piece, Miami blues once were common in South Florida. Too much pavement and mosquito spraying shoved them to extinction's brink.
About 1,000 now reside in the lab. Adults sip nectar from their favorite flowering plant, Spanish needles, and lay eggs on nickerbean shrubs brought from the Keys. Hatching, the resulting caterpillar eats more than three times its body weight in leaves per day. Adults also consume cocktails of watermelon-flavored Gatorade.
"They live longer when they drink Gatorade," Emmel says. "Gatorade ought to sponsor us."
A paradise for butterfliesWhoosh!
When you open the door, a super-charged fan almost knocks you over. The idea is to keep butterflies inside the atrium from escaping.
Walking around the Butterfly Rainforest with Emmel is like taking a tour of the Vatican with the pope.
Of course, there are monarchs and gulf fritillaries and giant swallowtails and other butterflies commonly seen in Florida. But there are also 6-inch tree nymphs, glorious white butterflies with black veins from the Philippines, and the astonishing 7-inch blue morpho - blue like the Gulfstream - from South America.
It's a butterfly paradise and a paradise for butterflies. There are no birds to eat them, no cats to knock them out of the air, no trucks spewing pesticides. In this garden of Eden, these spoiled butterflies live the life of Riley. Well, Riley - who is Riley anyway? - should be so lucky.
"Look, we've got some mating!" Emmel tells me. A voyeur, I follow his hand. On a slender poinciana tree limb that might as well be a cheap motel room on U.S. 441 sit a pair of bawdy butterflies, doing what comes naturally. "Helioconius erato," Emmel whispers.
Say what?
"Common name: "small postman."'
Now a lovely butterfly, the 6-inch birdwing from Asia, flaps by on tattered wings.
Too much sex can be a bad thing.
"The males constantly have to defend their territories against other males. They compete for mates, they compete for food."
So I'm wrong. Butterflies aren't relaxed. They exist on the brink of a nervous breakdown. They live a life right out of The Iliad.
Here comes foolish Hector, chasing Achilles, spoiling for a fight.
Wait a minute, that's not Achilles, it's a sweet little blue cracker butterfly, Hamadryas fornax, for those of us in the know.
-- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com
PREVIEWThe Butterfly Rainforest at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity is at the University of Florida Cultural Plaza, SW 34th Street and Hull Road, Gainesville. Take exit 384 from Interstate 75, travel east on State Road 24, then north on State Road 121, then east on Hull Road. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. Rainforest admission is $7.50 for adults, $6.50 for seniors and students, $4.50 for ages 3-12, free for children younger than 3. Wheelchair accessible. Call 352 846-2000 for information, or go to www.flmnh.ufl.edu/butterflies
FURTHER READING: Butterflies of Florida Field Guide, by Jaret C. Daniels, Adventure Publications.