Farming Butterflies.

My days in Seattle have fallen into a kind of pattern.
I spend the mornings doing something typically tourist-y. Like running through Pike's Market with some sort of exotic food in tow. And this morning I took my coffee and birth control atop the Space Needle. (I cannot believe I payed 16 dollars to be that high in the air for twenty minutes.) Then, I spend the afternoon perusing vintage clothing shops, internally mocking hipster (Kat to most of Seattle: If you're all trying to stick out from the crowd, you will all become the crowd.) People are really friendly here, though. But then, people are friendly everywhere.
Today I busted up my routine my venturing to the Pacific Science Center. (I had a City Pass and am a tremendous dork with a family full of biologists.)
There I happened across their Tropical Butterfly exhibit.
What gorgeousness.
An uncountable number of handsized butterflies circling my head or landing on plates full of cut-up oranges and bananas their tongues unfurled onto the smelly fruit. Butterfly on the cement floor, ancoring themselves against the air like tiny sailboats. A butterfly resting on a lilly pad in a small pool, a gold fish mouthing at its wings. I felt like Alice. All the unfamilar flora and the butterflies settling on my head like miniture hats. My hair curled in the artifical humidity.
Bright, shining uncommon Common Blue Morphos, morpho peleides, which, when my grandfather flew airplanes over rainforests in World War Two, said winked and sparkled below him. Papilio romanzovia, or Scarlet Swallotails. When a attendant pointed out the one Atlas moth, resting against a tree, I actually gasped it was so beautiful. These insects can have a wing span of up to twelve inches, but live only a week because once they emerge from their cacoons, they are unable to eat.
One wasn't able to touch the butterflies because the toxins on your hands actually shorten a butterflies life. I was worried about the shampoo I used killing the ones on my head.
I was lucky enough to have the one i liked best the caligo memnon or, the Owl Butterfly land on my hand for a few seconds. The Owl Butterfly's closed wings have a striking false eye. Fake yellow iris with black pupil. But I liked the other side of their wings, which were smokey purple with a little bit gold at their tops like the aurora borealis.
There was a window where one would look at all the insects chrysali, their coccons, which were pinned to a wall. A woman with large tweezers was picking up a the one's who had emerged and were flitting around. She left a the few that clung to their chrysalis because their wings were still wet. She put them in plastic boxes and they were released into the exhibit. A Box full of butterflies.
A few of the morphos we on the ground, one trying to mate with the other. The, male, you could tell from his bulging yellow insect genitalia, pushing the females wings open with his. Both the butterflies wings would flash open and shake. It was all very clumsy, their wings jerking open and closed on the pebbled asphalt floor. I mentioned this to an older museum employ and she said that butterflies had terrible eye sight and had to get right next to a fellow butterfly in order to see if it's even the right specis. I wanted to say that it all looked familar.
The masses of butterflies couln't actually reproduce because the exhibit didn't grow plants that the insects like to lay their eggs one. So where did the butterflies come from.
She told me the Science Center got them from their butterflies in the forms of unhatched chrysalis, which arrieves everyweek from butterfly farms. Butterfly farmers sectioned off parts of the rainforest with nets. They effected nothing about the forest but harvested the chrysalises and sent them to Seattle.
I asked the woman how much an average butterfly costs.
"About $2.50,". she said.
"No, it's $3.00," said the young man next to here, also in Science Center garb. "It went up again."
"Butterfly inflation," I said and turned on my camera.
The butterflies were like vampires or ghosts. I couldn't get decent pictures of them. My camera would unfocus right as the flash went off. All the photographs I have of the butterflies are blurry, like there was vaseline over the lins of my camera.
A few teenaged boys wandered around the exhibit picking up dead butterflies, with large tweezers.
I asked one boy what he did with the dead ones. A few were landing on the ground, flipping up side down. A few flew with chunks of their wings missing, victims of oblivious sneakers.
He said, "We take them in the back and put them in the buckets. At the end of the day we take the bucket out to the compost and they compost."
I stayed until the exhibit closed.