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About
45 minutes from San Jose there is a farm that cultivates and exports
butterflies. Our guide was fantastic, and he did an excellent job
detailing the many facets of butterfly farming. I won't bore you
with all of those details here, but I will bore you with some of them.
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| Swallowtail larvae |
Big-ass, mo-betta grown up Swallowtail |
The
Boring Details
As
promised...
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Get
your butterfly groove on, now! Butterflies spend most of
their lives in various stages that don't look anything like
butterflies (larvae, caterpillars, cocoons, etc). Once they
emerge from their cocoons and dry their wings, they have a few weeks
to grab a bite to eat, find a mate, and do the dirty deed before they
die... slightly reminiscent of last call at your favorite
watering hole. Remember, nobody's ugly at 2am.
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Muy
Guapo - As with birds, the males are the ones that get all decked
out in their bestduds to show off for the ladies. You can
usually tell a male butterfly from a female butterfly by how brightly
colored their wings are... the prettier of the two is typically
the male. This I learned only after pinning down one of these
poor little guys and trying to spot check, well, the thing that you
normally spot check when trying to determine if its a boy or a girl...
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Camouflage
- Butterflies in various stages use all kinds of tricks to keep from
becoming someone else's next meal. The swallow tail larvae
above, when sticking out from under a leaf, looks like a snake's
head... something most birds are willing to leave alone. Others
were speckled with silver spots, looking like a twig with dew on
it. The owl-eye butterfly below has a big eye on its wing to
make it look like one pissed-off, ready-to-open-a-can-of-whoop-ass
owl. Last, but not least, the most toxic butterflies often have
very bright colors as a warning to others. Some of the others
have managed to mimic their colors despite the fact that they are
completely harmless.
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Gimme
two dozen swallow tails, and a box of... Last fact, because
I can tell you are getting weary of these useless details...
They have a very large, screen-enclosed area of the garden where all
of the butterflies do their collective thing, and a trained biologist
carefully harvests the cocoons and maintains the host-plants that they
feed on. When a butterfly museum decides they want some
butterflies, they simply place an order and a few days later they
receive cocoons that are guaranteed to hatch.
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| Can't seem to remember the name of this
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Ditto.. |
One
interesting side bar is that in my home town of Durham, NC, the Museum of
Life and Science has a butterfly garden, and while I was snooping in, I
mean observing, the shipping department at the Finca de Mariposas, I saw a
list of customers, one of which was our very own museum! The
butterflies that we took Grandma to see were shipped as cocoons from this
very farm!
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