From the Miami Herald via the Forestry Conservation Portal
Thomas Emmel was 8 years old when he netted his first Western Tiger Swallowtail near the sycamore trees of his Southern California home.
The catch began a romance with butterflies and moths that has continued for 55 years. For them, he has built a home, won over thousands of admirers, traveled through land leeches and saved some from extinction.
Ten months ago, the University of Florida professor opened a lasting tribute to his life's passion: the world's largest research center for moths and butterflies.
The McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity in Gainesville houses the nation's largest moth and butterfly specimen collection, 4.2 million creatures in all. Worldwide, only the British Museum in London holds more.
The view from Emmel's second-floor office may be the best on campus. A panoramic 14-foot window opens into a giant atrium full of butterflies -- including Indigo Morphos from Costa Rica, Striped Zebras from Florida and Khaki Owl butterflies from Central and South America with deceptive black spots on their wings to ward off birds.
He is using the public atrium, along with displays and interactive exhibits, to build an army of scientists, lawyers, business people and others who will care enough to preserve and restore the earth's dying environments.
''This is a painless way to look at some of the more sophisticated aspects of biology,'' Emmel says as he makes his morning checks, noticing that an African Danaidae on display outside the atrium is missing its abdomen.
Moths and butterflies -- with species numbering some 265,000, compared with 5,000 mammals -- help measure the health of tropical rain forests and other environments. Scientists also use them to study topics ranging from genetics to the developing world's food supply. In Europe, researchers use lepidoptera -- the scientific word for moths and butterflies -- in AIDS studies. Colombians are breeding moths to destroy cocaine-producing crops.
Amid the flutter of colors in the atrium, waterfalls cascade into ponds with black and orange-splotched koi fish. Visitors may wander among 50 types of orchids and 300 other plant species.
As Emmel walks in, a black-white-violet-and-bronze Cracker Butterfly lands on his shirt, not far from his butterfly tie.
THEY LIKE SWEAT
Emmel is happy for the company but unsentimental. Butterflies, especially the colorful males, gravitate to human sweat, he explains. Though butterflies live only a few weeks, Emmel says he recognizes many in the atrium by the shrubs they frequent or the fraying of their wings.
Butterfly people are an unusual breed. They combine the curiosity of scientists with the sensitivity of artists and the obsessiveness of collectors. Emmel is all of that, a joyful eccentric who gently strokes one of three pet emus in his spacious yard on a recent afternoon at home.
Emmel and other researchers at the McGuire Center try to dispel the myth of the 19th Century collector wandering the countryside with a net. Yes, they use nets. And collectors do contribute important work.
Still, Emmel likes to point out that moths and butterflies are ideal lab companions. Their short life span, compact size and colorful wing patterns make them useful in measuring evolutionary changes in short spans.
Most butterfly and moth people ''are drawn to a certain experience they had when they were young,'' said Jaret Daniels, assistant director of the McGuire Center.
Daniels, 37, fills the atrium with 600 to 1,000 new butterflies each week, shipped from around the world in the pupae state before their wings emerge. When he was 5 years old in Racine, Wisc., his grandfather would bring him coffee cans filled with silk moth caterpillars. He saw his first moth emerge and he was hooked. The scent of coffee still fills him with wonder.
''I moved on to butterflies, but I still love'' moths, he says.
At 16, Daniels sent a series of letters and found a mentor who took him and two dozen entomologysts to the Kew Mountains of French Guiana. He spent 12 days sleeping in a hammock in a pristine rainforest, surrounded by birds, monkeys, jaguars and pumas.
The scientist who led the trip was Tom Emmel.
Daniels remained inspired by Emmel, years later earning his doctorate in entomology at UF. His work includes helping Emmel restore the Miami Blue to its native habitat in the Everglades and Biscayne National Park. They're also working on a statewide ''citizen'' butterfly monitoring network that uses the Internet to track populations and prevent species from becoming endangered.
Emmel has disciples like Daniels all over the butterfly world -- including the founder of Butterfly World in Coconut Creek.
''It's really an important aspect of what we're trying to do,'' Emmel said. ``If you want to save the world it doesn't do any good to preach in an empty church or write a paper that's read by 20 scientists.''
RUSSIAN STUDENT
Andrei Sourakov, now an assistant curator, sought out Emmel from Russia to pursue his PhD at UF in 1990. By 1995, he and three Russian classmates were so appreciative of Emmel's guidance that they brought him a Shetland pony one cold Christmas Eve because they heard Emmel mention off-hand that he liked miniature horses.
Sourakov said Emmel has used his own money on more than one occasion to help researchers pay for their work.
Emmel's optimistic disposition is rattled when he talks about government cutbacks and obstruction to conservation projects. In 1997, he clashed publicly with federal bureaucrats when they failed to reimburse him for his efforts to rescue the Schaus Swallowtail. He is currently angry at the Bush administration for refusing to include the Miami blue on its list of endangered species.
Emmel says the government is burying its head when it comes to the environment -- pointing out that a population of butterflies in the western U.S. is fleeing to higher altitudes because the climate in its old habitat is suffering the effects of global warming.
''That's what I worry about late at night,'' he says.
The McGuire Center is an unusually open research facility, owing to the close relationship that moth and butterfly experts have always had with amateur enthusiasts. Visitors can look into the window where Paul Goldstein extracts moths' DNA with a machine that looks something like a food processor. Through another window, they can watch Lorraine Duerdin mount butterflies one at a time using pins, graph paper and white labels with tiny writing.
Behind the scenes, it's more chaotic. Hallways and offices overflow with stacks of wood drawers that house mounted butterflies from Kazakhstan, Madagascar and Asia.
Curator Jacqueline Miller is beleaguered, playing the part of the loveably crusty librarian who is swimming against disorder as she tries to integrate these thousands of moth and butterfly drawers into library stacks. She and husband Lee -- she affectionately calls him ''Miller'' -- have been collecting and curating butterflies for 37 years. They worry that future generations won't share their enthusiasm for collecting.
ENTHUSIASTS
Butterfly collecting attracts thousands of mostly older enthusiasts -- Emmel has heard of as many as 100,000 in Japan. It's the rare science where amateurs contribute more than experts. Emmel has collaborated on several of his 35 books with his brother John Emmel, a physician in California.
Another amateur enthusiast, Bill McGuire, donated $7.2 million of the $12 million needed for the research center. He is the chief executive officer of United Health Group in Minnesota. But his passion for butterflies began during his medical residency in the late 1970s, when he studied the Hesperia butterflies of California in his free time.
''In the big scheme of things, I don't think it's about butterflies, a butterfly or a group of butterflies,'' McGuire said. ``The butterflies are indicators and they are tools to in fact study biodiversity and environmental changes.''
It's evening at the butterfly atrium and Emmel has returned with graduate student Christian Salcedo to observe Zebra Longwings. Salcedo spends three hours a night watching them here -- trying to determine how and why they sleep together on the same branch every night.
Emmel says it's a kind of intelligence some butterflies have, obviously using a slightly nuanced version of the word. Still, heliconiine butterflies are known to travel nine meandering miles before returning home to rest on a favorite branch.
Salcedo flashes a soft light on the pack of about three dozen longwings roosting by a bromeliad.
There are no visitors in the atrium at night, just the sounds of the waterfalls.
Emmel wanders the paths, flashing lights on the trees. He can't stop pointing out butterflies.
