The late Ray Shannon with some of his 300-plus collection of mounted butterflies from around the world. Photo / Brett Phibbs
The late Ray Shannon with some of his 300-plus collection of mounted butterflies from around the world. Photo / Brett Phibbs
"You know they drink the tears of crocodiles?"
Writer Courtney Sina Meredith looks up from the table and gives a conspiratorial smile.
She's talking about butterflies.
For the past few months, Sina Meredith and illustrator Giselle Clarkson have been focused on the winged insects. They were brought together by Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira to write and illustrate Secret World of Butterflies.
It's a children's book to accompany an eye-opening exhibition of some 6000 butterflies, displayed in 333 trays - to be changed out twice during the 11-month long exhibition. As well as highlighting the variety and colour of the world's butterflies and moths, Secret World of Butterflies explores the science, such as metamorphosis, anatomy and habitats.
Like drinking the tears of crocodiles - or, to be more precise, the tear of yellow-throated caimans from Brazil, home to Julia butterflies who need the salt in caiman tears so tickle their eyes until the reptiles cry.
There are some fascinating facts that delighted Sina Meredith and Clarkson and even led to John Early, the museum's Curator of Entomology, reconsidering his thoughts on butterflies.
"I used to dismiss them; I called them the 'tarts of the insect world', but the more I have read and learned, the more interesting their life cycles and their strategies for survival become," says Early, who specialises in studies of New Zealand's insects, particularly parasitic wasps.
Clarkson says anyone who thinks butterflies are easy to draw should spare a moment to think about the sheer diversity of butterflies and the fact that there can be subtle differences between entirely separate species, which someone will notice if she gets it wrong.
A digital garden will be one of the stars of Secret World of Butterflies exhibition at Auckland Museum.
That someone might be a lepidopterist like the late Ray Shannon, a man who managed to find beauty even in war. It's because of the former North Shore resident that the exhibition and children's book have come about.
In 2008, shortly before his death, aged 91, Shannon gave his entire collection of 13,000 butterflies to the museum, having spent a lifetime collecting them. Early believes Shannon's fascination started in World War II when he was an electrical engineer with the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department, a job he retained his entire working life.
The story goes that while stationed in the Solomon Islands, Shannon went armed with equipment to catch butterflies and spied his first birdwing butterfly. These are among the largest butterflies in the world and males are spectacularly coloured; Shannon risked life and limb trying to catch one.
"He was working on the side of a steep hillside but he forgot where he was and leaped into the air to try to catch it, crash-landed few metres down and ended up a little grazed and bruised," says Early.
Surviving the experience, and the war itself, Shannon simply never stopped collecting.
He travelled the world in pursuit of butterflies, gathering a cosmopolitan collection with Australasia, Asia and South America strongly represented (the New Zealand ones are in the museum's main collection) along with some larger and more spectacular moths. When ill-health limited Shannon's travels, he turned to the internet to source species.
In the years since the collection has been housed at Auckland Museum, species have been named, their genders identified, and then placed in vertical columns in collection drawers.
It has become an invaluable resource for identifying protected species, sometimes used by border officials to check whether those brought into the country are protected by international conventions.
The Secret World of Butterflies.
SECRET WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES by Courtney Sina Meredith, illustrated by Giselle Clarkson (Allen & Unwin and Auckland War Memorial Museum, $23)
What: Secret World of Butterflies Where and when: Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, June 9, 2018-May 26, 2019
The noisy, the yucky and the soupy secrets
They're beautiful as they flutter by but there's more.
You may think butterflies are all sweetness and light, but some facts Auckland Museum's curator of entomology John Early may make you feel differently about them.
1 Not all butterflies are silent. There are a group of butterflies called crackers, which make a cracking sound a bit like bacon frying in a pan. It seems to be territorial, and it's done by the males. Scientists used to think it was a percussive thing, with the veins of the wings hitting together, but research has found that's not the case, because even butterflies with damaged wings still make the cracking sound. Research has found quite a lot of butterflies can hear, even butterflies that don't make sounds.
2 They will feed on carrion, urine and faeces. Adult butterflies have a proboscis, so they have to have a liquid diet. Some use it to feed on dead animals, to take in the liquid and get a bit of protein, but the main reason is to get minerals and salts. If you're feeding all the time on the nectar of flowers you're getting a lot of energy but not a lot of the other nutrients you need. A lot of butterflies will feed on animal dung and urine, as well as drinking from muddy puddles and water in volcanic areas, to get those minerals. In places like Southeast Asia you often see butterflies drinking from puddles.
3 Butterflies only ever do one poo in their lives. Every adult butterfly does one poo in its life, when it hatches out from its chrysalis. It can't poo when it's in the chrysalis, so one of the first things it does when it hatches is produce some meconium, which is all the metabolic waste that has been generated. For the rest of their lives, they don't poo - because butterflies have a liquid diet, there's not really any solid waste to get rid of.
4 Some butterflies are so big, collectors used to shoot them out of the sky. The biggest butterflies in the world are the birdwing butterflies, the largest of which have a wingspan of 32 cm. The largest of all is the Queen Alexandra's birdwing, which comes from Papua New Guinea, and the females are bigger than the males. Because they are so big they don't tend to fly very far, so different species are found in very localised areas. All birdwing butterflies are now protected by the CITES Treaty, so are protected from international trade.
5 A caterpillar becomes "soup" before turning into a butterfly. The process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly in the chrysalis is a miracle, and it doesn't get any less amazing the more you think about it. When a caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, a gene is switched on which breaks down most of its body into a "soup" of proteins and lipids. The only thing that doesn't break down are some clusters of cells called 'imaginal discs' that have been in the caterpillar's body all its life, which are programmed to become organs like legs or antennae or nerves - a bit like stem cells. These start multiplying like crazy and growing into the different parts of the adult butterfly.
