'Behind the Scenes' at the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven

Just before you go up the ramp to the entrance of the butterfly exhibit, look in the window on your right. This is the butterfly conservation project lab. Vincent tells me about the important work that’s done here. “We work on butterfly conservation. We have a genetics portion of the butterfly conservation project and we look at the DNA of local populations of butterflies that are very small populations to see how robust their populations are, how robust their DNA is. Adjacent to the Haven are interactive graphics that encourage visitors to learn about the lifecycles, migration, and behavior of butterflies.

 

Not only do we show butterflies for education but we also raise rare and endangered species of native butterflies; butterflies that are native to Illinois or that have been wiped out of Illinois over the last 50 or 100 years. We raise them in our lab; we bring in females, get them to lay eggs here in the lab. We raise them to the right size, and we bring them to sites in Illinois where they used to live but where they’ve been wiped out. At present, we have 3600 larvae in our lab. Last year, we raised and released 774 Silver-bordered Fritillarys,and 256 Baltimore Checkerspots." He refers to a chart that has been posted for visitors, with this information and information about the conservation project.

 

And there is more than this lab and the exhibit. It seems that butterflies, in one stage or another, are everywhere. Vincent explains. “On top of our roof, we actually overwinter larvae in containers.” He points to what looks like upside down, shallow ceramic pots. “Winter hibernation in insects is called diapause. When larvae are ready to overwinter, they actually stop eating and they just kind of curl up and usually will dig themselves down in the debris on the ground, sticks and leaves. What we do is give them a paper towel and a cup, and we put them in there (beneath the pot) and they basically just go to sleep. These flower pots work well because they keep the humidity level high but they still give them some cover. We go up there a couple of times during the winter and check hydration; if they look like they’re dry, we might wake them up and put them on a little bit of wet paper, and let them drink, but for the most part, we let them do what they would do out in nature. And they stay outside all winter. In spring, we open the containers, wake them up, and they continue their life cycle. Most of these are tiny, 2 or 3 millimeter caterpillars. It’s surprising that they can make it through winters here, but they’re well adapted to surviving through winters. In the summertime, every shelf in this lab is full of containers of caterpillars and we’re bustling all the time. In the winter, when the season is slow, everything gets moved to the roof for overwintering and this lab kind of shuts down.”

 

As we leave the lab and head up the ramp to the butterfly haven, Vincent explains the science behind what we see. “In 1998, when the butterfly haven was originally opened, it opened as a native butterfly house, so you would only see butterflies you would see in the United States. In about 2001, we changed over into tropical butterflies. We now show about 45 to 50 species of exotic butterflies all year round, and it changes a little bit throughout the year depending on availability from our suppliers. We usually have about 1200 butterflies in the exhibit. Butterfly exhibits are interesting exhibits. One reason that they are becoming more and more popular in the United States is that they are an exhibit where you are not looking at animals behind glass, you’re kind of standing in the animal’s home and the animals are moving around you. ”

 

The 2,700 square foot Judy Istock Butterfly Haven is a 28-foot tall greenhouse. Try to imagine being in the midst of a garden of tropical plants, a waterfall, and 1200 butterflies – everywhere. Butterflies are flying, landing, coming in to land. Groups of school children are coming in and going out, and with all of this activity, I wonder about Butterfly Escape? Vincent tells me this doesn’t happen very often. “Because these butterflies are exotic, we have to follow guidelines set forth by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make sure that we keep these exotic insects from getting out. We have enough problems in the country with invasive species; plants, fish; you hear a lot about Carp right now, insects. And a lot of animals too; even animals that we think are pretty common, like deer, and pigeons are non-native animals that were brought here. Now they’re here, and we learn to live with them, but we don’t want to have to introduce any more animals to our native environment. We want to make sure that we don’t let anything out.

 

Here in the vestibule, we have these two sets of double doors, and we have an air curtain; all rules set forth by the USDA to help keep this room a containment facility, and that just means that we have set up barriers to keep the butterflies in. The air that blows down and the double doors- overhang with no plants nearby deters butterfly escape. Also, if you look at the doors, we don’t put any flowers anywhere near the doors, so we’re not kind of attracting butterflies over to the doors with flowers, and that keeps them away from here too. Occasionally, a butterfly might escape, but our visitor service monitors and all the staff here are trained on putting butterflies back in very quickly. Luckily, our butterfly exhibit is different than a lot of others. Most butterfly exhibits open to the outdoors, but ours opens to a really big museum, so our chances of anything getting out are very low.”

 

“The average lifespan of a butterfly is just a few weeks but it really varies a lot depending on the butterfly. These Owl butterflies are feeding on fruits. They live a little bit longer. And then, these Longwing butterflies have an interesting relationship with a couple of different vines that produce a lot of pollen. All the amino acids and the other good stuff that’s in pollen, makes them live a lot longer too. The Longings can sometimes live for two or three months. There are the Rice Paper butterflies from Asia, kind of a distant relative of the Monarch. And then we’ve got the Blue Morphos.

 

Some butterflies taste good to other animals, so they have to use different techniques for staying out of trouble. Some of them simply look like leaves, or look like plants, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might not even spot them. Some butterflies have eye spots, (Owl butterflies) and to a bird, or a lizard or a small animal, if you saw those big eyes staring at you, really, you would get out of there. And other butterflies taste pretty bad to other animals because the plants they feed on as caterpillars have some toxins in them. Monarchs are a good example. They’re very brightly colored because they feed on milkweed, and milkweed is toxic. The Rice Papers, the relative of the Monarch I showed you, is another one of those (that don’t taste good). Butterflies that have these bright colors, usually these same patterns on the top and the underside of their wings, are the butterflies that taste bad. And butterflies that taste good usually have some sort of camouflage or some sort of color that helps them hide.”

 

For a few minutes, we just watch. There is so much delicate movement here and so much color. I point out several beautiful butterflies which have landed on an outcropping of rock- “The Scarlet Peacock butterfly is from Suriname. They’re doing something that butterflies do when they want to warm up, and that’s basking. When they’re cool, they stay in the sun, and they spread their wings and soak up the heat of the sun. These butterflies really show up well in our exhibit; they land on the flowers, and people can see them really well.” Vincent is right about camouflage. ‘Eyes’ are everywhere. “These Owl butterflies are great because they like to fly around during the day, and they like to kind of play with each other, and they’ll sort of fly in circles. They also fly at the very end of the day too, so if you’re in here, right before we close, all the Owl butterflies just kind of use the exhibit space and fly all around.

 

You can hear our birds squawking from the trees. We have birds and other animals in here too. A couple of tree frogs have found a home in here, and you can sometimes spot them, if you have a really keen eye. We have a few different types of birds, mostly tropical birds; finches and honey creepers that come from Asia, Africa, Central and South America. Most of those birds are birds that eat seeds and fruits so we don’t really have to worry about them eating butterflies. For the ones who do eat insects, we provide them supplemental insects; dried insects in their food, Mealworms and Waxworms that are the larvae of a beetle and a moth.

 

We also have some little ground birds that walk around; Asian quail; they’re a very small kind of bird called a Button Quail. They’re a little smaller than a baseball, and they don’t get any bigger than that. They’re very cute little birds. And they actually help us with our pest control, eating bugs that are in the soil.

 

Because we have all these exotic insects and exotic birds, we want to be really careful with what we put into our exhibit. There aren’t any chemicals in here at all except sometimes, fertilizers for the plants. All of our pest control is done by beneficial insects. We release different insects that eat bad bugs; Ladybugs, for example, eat Aphids. Most people know about those. We release tons of ladybugs in here. We release Wasps in here that eat different types of bugs that suck juices out of plants. We release Nematodes (Roundworms) into the soil to eat the larvae of Gnats. And we even have a couple of birds in here that eat a lot of different pests on trees. So they’re insect eaters, but they like to eat tiny little bugs, and they’ll go to the plants and pick off all the bugs that could potentially be a problem for a greenhouse environment.”

 

“We’ve got sort of a tropical environment here. We plant butterfly nectar plants. We don’t plant any host plants. The butterflies do mate occasionally but they don’t lay eggs. Butterflies are very particular on what they lay their eggs on. Each butterfly only lays its eggs on a certain group of plants. Monarch butterflies and other only lay their eggs on milkweeds. Longwing butterflies only lay their eggs on passion vines. So, if we don’t plant those plants, they don’t lay their eggs. Some Swallowtails lay their eggs on citrus, so sometimes we’ll put oranges out and they’ll lay their eggs at the edges of the plates or at the edge of the orange, but even when they lay eggs, they either don’t hatch or we take them in right away and put them in the autoclave.

 

One of the rules that the USDA gives us to show off these butterflies is that we don’t raise any caterpillars. Caterpillars are so tiny that they could get out really easily and they are so voracious, that they would eat too many plants. They would devour all of these plants. We don’t have an offsite greenhouse, so everything that we grow in this room has to produce nectar for our butterflies. We do a pretty major replanting about once a year, but we don’t have the benefit of having a greenhouse and being able to change out plants. We have to make sure that everything in here stays in here and doesn’t get devoured. The USDA regulates pretty much any exhibit where you’re showing off any kind of live insect, where you’re bringing in any kind of exotic plant species, to make sure that we’re not bringing in anything that could potentially be a pest in our area.”

 

 

“One of the other things about having tropical butterflies in here, is that obviously, we have to keep it pretty warm, and pretty humid, We keep it around 80 degrees in here almost all of the time, and at about 80 percent humidity. That’s good for the butterflies. Butterflies are exothermic, so they get their temperature from whatever the temperature is around them, that’s how they stay warm. So, if it’s too cold in here, butterflies just won’t fly around, especially, these exotic butterflies. In the winter, when it’s cold and dark, we have subliminal lighting that comes on; that lighting mimics the natural lighting, natural sun, so it helps our plants and keeps our butterflies flying. Even on a cloudy day, we still get a lot of activity in here. Obviously, the best time to come is on a sunny day, and morning is the best. Right up until about 1 PM is when you see the most activity, butterflies flying around.”

 

It is always with reluctance that I leave the butterfly haven but we are heading to another lab to see where it all begins. In this lab is something like a butterfly nursery. As I peer into one side of the glass, a group of inquisitive children peer into the other. The emergence case is set in the window of the lab, providing easy access to the public.

I am peering into the “emergence case”. In sections, divided by species, the butterfly pupae/chrysalises hang suspended in this case until they emerge. Vincent tells me that “Butterflies have to come out of their chrysalis pretty quickly; they have to pull themselves out of that chrysalis in just about four or five minutes. If the temperature and the humidity are not right, they can’t get themselves out, and they’ll get stuck. Their wings will get stuck or their legs will get stuck. We keep it really humid in here; sometimes about 90 percent humidity.” Carefully reaching into the emergence case, he takes a squirming pupa out to show me. “Here’s one that’s just emerged. Its wings are still soft, and I caught it in time to hang it up, because after they pull themselves out, then they have to hang and pump the fluids in their abdomen into their wings. And those veins are filled with those fluids, and when that hardens, that’s what gives a butterfly its stiff wings, so it can fly.”

 

Every day, the pupae that have become butterflies are collected, placed in a screened flight case, and taken to be released into the haven. (Release times are at 2 PM on Mondays, and at 1:30 PM on other days.) Every day is different because the emergence rate of the individual pupae is different. Species type and number of butterflies depend upon emergence rate and time of year.

 

Vincent tells me that “The main purpose of this room is to receive the butterflies that we get from butterfly farms. We have butterfly suppliers all over the world. Butterfly farms are unique businesses. In countries where a lot of rainforest or just native land is cut down to grow other cash crops, these farms grow butterflies instead. They usually encourage growth of a lot of native plants because the native plants, a lot of times, serve as food plants for the caterpillars of the butterflies. And so, by raising those native plants instead of cutting down rainforests, we’re conserving, a little bit. Butterflies also fetch a much higher price than cash crops like bananas, and oranges and mangoes and all those kind of things.

 

This week we got a butterfly shipment from Columbia. Here in the United States, we got Gulf Coast butterflies from Florida. The nice thing about butterflies, and one of the reasons this whole butterfly exhibit works is that butterflies stay in their chrysalis for a week or two. Our butterfly farmers time their butterflies very carefully, and they send them to us as the butterflies are turning into chrysalis. We get them here and they sit in this case until they emerge. Today, we have a lot of things emerging from the week before. Rice Paper butterflies are emerging from Malaysia. We’ve got some Common Mormon butterflies. Those Swallowtail butterflies come from Malaysia as well. We’ve got a bunch of Monarchs, from Florida that is emerging.

 

The butterflies come to us as pupae/chrysalises, wrapped in cotton or paper, packed in Styrofoam boxes. At this time of year when it’s cold, there are little heat pan warmers in the boxes. Once the boxes are unpacked and the pupae are counted, per USDA guidelines, all of the packing material is removed and disposed of properly. Any organic material that comes out of the exhibit, whether its plants that we cut down or food that we take out, or dead butterflies; they get autoclaved, which is a type of steaming, that kills any types of bacteria or pathogens that wouldn’t hurt people but maybe could potentially hurt other insects. We keep track of everything that comes in, and we keep track of all of our emergence rates. Butterfly farms are just like any other of farm. We want to know what kind of quality we’re getting; we’re paying for these butterflies, we want to get the best we can get for our money.

 

We keep track of how many butterflies might be diseased potentially, how many butterflies don’t emerge well. Sometimes butterflies get parasites; a little wasp will come over to a caterpillar and lay an egg on its back and those eggs will hatch into the caterpillar, and the caterpillar will grow and continue doing his thing like nothing is going on and then when it pupates, when it turns into a chrysalis, those wasp larvae will take over, and instead of the butterfly emerging, you sometimes get 100 tiny little wasps. One reason that we have this pupae/chrysalises case is those parasites; we want to contain them. If they do emerge in the case, we can actually open up the case, and we can shoot Carbon dioxide in. When you expose butterflies and most other insects to Carbon dioxide, they fall asleep. So, we knock everything out, and we use a little vacuum cleaner to suck up the parasitic wasps, and then, the butterflies will wake up, and we can hang them back up, and everything is fine. But we don’t like to do that unless we have to because it is a time consuming process. Most of us can look at the chrysalis and tell whether one of them is diseased or not, and whether one of them has parasites in it or not. Most of our butterfly farmers reimburse us for things that have been parasitized or don’t emerge well. Butterfly farming is a big business. There are a lot of butterfly exhibits in the world, so they try to give us the best quality, and we want to buy the best quality.

 

We also look at these butterflies all the time because we want to make sure that we’re using butterflies that show well. It’s great to have a million different types of butterflies and show off all these gorgeous butterflies. If we show a little butterfly that’s very small, and stays in the plants, and really doesn’t fly around, and people never see it, we might be spending two or three thousand dollars a year, combined, on just those little butterflies that don’t really do anything. We choose butterflies carefully, and our species exhibit changes, depending upon the time of year. We get butterflies from Australia, Asia, Africa, China, Central and South America, Ecuador. We get some from the United States. Most of those come from butterfly farmers in Florida, and the south.

 

Today, we have a lot of Birdwing butterflies emerging. Once a month, we get a shipment of Birdwings from Australia, and they’re one of our largest butterflies. They’re our most expensive butterfly, (about #10. Each) so we only buy them once a month. Our shipments are pretty expensive but they live for quite a long time, sometimes three or four weeks. . They really use our exhibit space well. In Chicago, generally, we have cloudy, grey days. These Butterflies live in the understory of the rainforest where it is kind of cloudy and shady, and they still really like to fly around and they don’t have any problem with a little less sun than some of the other butterflies that like really bright sun.”

 

Vincent takes a newly emerged butterfly from the case to give me a closer look.

“We don’t generally let people touch butterflies and the reason is that you’ll hurt a butterfly by wiping off its scales. A lot of people say that if you wipe off the powder of a butterfly, you can hurt it. You really can’t hurt the butterfly by wiping off the scales, but you do take off its color. That’s what its color is just comprised of, tiny little scales. Butterflies are delicate. I’m holding him by his body so he doesn’t flap his wings, but if I grab him in the wrong place and he could flap his wings, he could easily break his wings, and we have to remember that butterflies are fully grown insects; once they come out of their chrysalis, they’re adult insects. They don’t grow anymore. So, if you break off a leg or a wing of a butterfly, it’s not going to grow back. So, we always have to be careful when we handle them, and we ask when you come to the butterfly house, you don’t touch the butterflies.

 

Pretty much everybody who comes to this museum comes to this exhibit. This is really one of the best places to be when there’s a really heavy snow outside. You can look out of the windows and see North Pond, which is gorgeous in the winter when it is covered in snow, when you’re in here, where it’s nice and warm and steamy.” On the day of my visit, there was no snow outside yet, but Vincent described it as an especially good day because of there being a lot of butterflies due to be released into the haven. I admit my bias. Time spent here on any day is a memorable experience. If I were to recommend one place to see in Chicago, it would be the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven. My special thanks to Vincent  Olivares for taking the time to take me “Behind the Scenes”. In writing this, it was my pleasure to relive my visit and to be able to share it with you.  

 

On Tuesday, December 29th, become part of the magic. "Adopt a Butterfly". You will be able to adopt and release your very own Longwing Butterfly in the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven, and you will receive a certificate marking the event.                                                                          

Butterfly release times are 12 PM - 12:30 PM, and 3 PM - 3:30 PM. Space is limited and no more than two people per butterfly are allowed. Cost: $15/member and $20/non-member.

For more information, http://www.naturemuseum.org/, or to pre-register 773/755-5100.