Some Basic Facts Regarding Butterflies

When at rest, the wings of a butterfly are usually erect whereas that of a moth's are sloped downward -- like the sides of a tent.

A butterfly has a hollow thread-like tongue through which fluids may be pumped up and which, when not in use, is coiled up like a watch spring.

There are thirteen segments to a caterpillar, not including the distinct horny head.

A caterpillar of a butterfly forms into a chrysalis in which a good part of its body is covered, but not wholly like the cocoon of a moth.

The life of caterpillars vary greatly. From birth to chrysalis, the duration may be as short as ten days (at least a month ordinarily). There are those that hibernate nearly a year, and in some cases even two winters, meaning that their larval existence alone may span eighteen to twenty months.

Among butterfly families, only the Skipper forms a cocoon.

The antennae of the butterfly is probably the organ responsible for its keen sense of smell; their sense of taste is in evidence when they imbibe fluids well past their capacity of satiating hunger to the point they have trouble flying.

Hidden scales in certain species of male butterflies lead to a gland that serve as scent-organs which give off perfumes as that of flowers, sandal-wood, and musk.

Courtesy of _Webster's Third New International Dictionary (unabridged)_

caldera: a crater whose diameter is many times that of the volcanic vent because of the collapse or subsidence of the central part of a volcano or because of explosions of extraordinary violence.

fumarole: hole in a volcanic region and usu. in lava from which issue gases and vapors at high temperature.

epiphyte: [eh puh fite] a plant that grows upon another plant (as a tree) nonparasitically or sometimes upon some other object (as a building or telegraph wire), derives its moisture and nutrients from the air and rain and sometimes from debris accumulating around it, and is found in the temperate zones (as many mosses, liverworts, lichens, and algae) and in the tropics (as many ferns, cacti, orchids, and bromeliads).

mycorrhiza: [my cah rye zah] the symbiotic association of the mycelium of a fungus (as various basidiomycetes and ascomycetes) with the roots of a seed plant (as various conifers, beeches, heaths, and orchids) in which the hyphae form an interwoven mass investing the root tips or penetrate the parenchyma of the root.

In his book _The Diversity of Life_ Edward O. Wilson writes:

"Perch like notothenioid fishes swim there [shallow bays of Antarctica] in temperatures just above the freezing point of salt water but cold enough to turn ordinary blood to ice, because they are able to generate glycopeptides in their tissues as antifreeze and thrive where other fish cannot go."

 He also writes: 


"The spider stands on the edge of a leaf or some other exposed spot and lets out a thread of silk from the spinnerets at the posterior tip of its abdomen. As the strand grows it catches an air current and stretches downwind like the string of a kite. The spider spins more and more of the silk until the thread exerts a strong pull on its body. Then it releases its grip on the surface and soars upward. Not just pinhead-sized babies but large spiders can occasionally reach thousands of meters of altitude and travel hundreds of kilometers before settling to the ground to start a new life." 

By this method and variations of it, insects have repopulated Krakatua, a volcanic island the size of Manhattan located between Sumatra and Java, after a massive eruption on the morning of August 27, 1883, virtually extinguished every life form the island had sustained.


Also:

" 'Human hunters help no species.' That is a general truth and the key to the whole melancholy situation. As the human wave rolled over the last virgin lands like a smothering blanket, Paleo-Indians throughout America, Polynesians across the Pacific, Indonesians into Madagascar, Dutch sailors ashore on Mauritius (to meet and extirpate the dodo), they were constrained neither by knowledge of endemicity nor any ethic of conservation. For them the world must have seemed to stretch forever beyond the horizon. If fruit pigeons and giant tortoises disappear from this island, they will surely be found on the next one. What counts is food today, a healthy family, and tribute for the chief, victory celebrations, rites of passage, feasts. As the Mexican truck driver said who shot one of the last two imperial woodpeckers, largest of all the world's woodpeckers, 'It was a great piece of meat.'"

And more:

"It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia's pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin's disease and childhood lymphocytic leukemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery and so on down a roster already grown long and illustrious despite the limited research addressed to it."

Some startling facts from _Nabokov's Blues_

A conservative estimate of the number of living species on Earth is 10 million, while 100 million is the most extreme.  A mere 1.5 million has been studied and named by science.

Tropical rain forests, which comprise 6 percent of the Earth's land area, are host to more than 50 percent of its plant and animal species.  Alas, at the rate tropical rain forests are being denuded, they may not exist by the year 2032 except for a few isolated reserves.

If living species are organized in terms of a pyramid, then microorganisms, whose number and variety are greater than any other living specie, occupy the base of the pyramid followed by plants, then plant eaters, and finally by meat eaters. What's alarming is the disproportionate ratio between the type and number of the living species that have yet to be discovered and the type and number of scientists who are trained to seek them out for scientific inquiry.

For argument's sake, let's say that for every ten herpetologists there is one entomologist. Does that make sense when for every reptile specie new to science there are 100 species of insects that are, likewise, new to science? No, of course not, but such is the state of the current scientific community.