Word: lepidoptera
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...have tasted all my butterflies, just crunched on them a bit," says Deane Bowers, assistant professor of biology and curator of Harvard's vast lepidoptera collection. Deep in the heart of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, her office is filled with frame after frame of the insects, and butterfly earrings dangle whimsically from her ears. "Checkerspots," she notes with a grin, "have a really bitter taste...
BUTTERFLIES by Thomas C. Emmel. 244 pages. Knopf. $29.95. Some of these rare Lepidoptera are so luminescent they produce optical shock. Even the commoner varieties blend the lyrical with the clinical, intriguing both scientist and layman. Accompanying facts are as remarkable as the closeup images. The ubiquitous orange monarch, for example, is the only true round-trip migrant among the world's 20,000 species. Although only one family of butterflies is called satyrs, most males exhibit an aggressive libido as soon as they emerge from the chrysalis-they can detect females by odor, flight signals, and ultraviolet waves...
WHEN VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH Nabokov says he writes, ideally, for a lot of little nabokovs, he's not just talking about people who share his eccentric view of "reality" (always in quotes) or his predilection for lepidoptera. To fully appreciate Nabokov's work you need at least a portion of easy brilliance, his fluency in three languages, and his passion for the purest and most pointless play with words. Beyond that, to enjoy his latest novel it helps to have a passing familiarity with his entire oeuvre...
...summer, the hotel and town are crammed with tourists. It is time for the Nabokovs to leave. They do -to a different place every year, chosen for the local lepidoptera. This year it will be Lugano. Nabokov seemingly never tires of saying he may return to the U.S. "Especially in spring," he says, "I dream of going to spend my purple-plumed sunset in California, among the larkspurs and oaks and in the serene silence of her university libraries...
...there are legions of vagabonds like Corominas. In the rain forests of the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Amherst Biologist Lincoln Brower, 34, is leaping after lepidoptera to check out a theory that the color patterns of butterflies edible to birds are evolving toward the color patterns of nonedible butterflies, as a measure of survival. Last week Entomologist Dennis Hynes, 37, of California State Polytech, slipped on snowshoes to walk atop thigh-deep drifts on Washington's Mount Baker and bring back iceboxes filled with larvae specimens of a crop-killing insect called the crane...