Color is a power which directly influences the soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
Long ago, when I was twenty, penniless, and hanging in London, looking for something free to do, I drifted into the city’s Tate Gallery—filled with some of the world’s best-known art—and walked straight into a staggering J. M. W. Turner masterpiece.
I was gobsmacked.
Knocked for a loop.
Brilliant and shimmering, shrieking with yellows and oranges and reds swirling around smoky-vague outlines of battling ships at sea, that painting owned me.
If you’ve seen Turner’s creations, you know why. His works tap into a secret crevasse in the human psyche, a down-the-rabbit-hole neural pathway from which, for some of us, there is no escape. It’s a biological thing. An evolutionary mandate. Only recently discovered by science but long understood intuitively by artists, this hidden desire elicits a unique kind of hypnotic trance—a craving for color.
Standing before Turner’s work, I was mesmerized.
I tried to wind my way through the mysteries of the thing. This was pure experience. I knew nothing about Art. I was an innocent. I had no idea who Turner was, no clue that he was considered a genius who paved the way for Impressionism. I had not been prepped to venerate his work. This was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
A first kiss.
I was never again so deliciously, so exquisitely, so naively shocked.
Until …
I was sucker-punched once again. This time it was in Larry Gall’s Yale University offices. Interested in the crazy, titillating, and sometimes even deadly world of butterfly obsession, I had come to meet Gall, the university’s trim, bespectacled computer expert and keeper of more than a century’s worth of butterfly, moth, and caterpillar collections. Brought to Yale from locations worldwide were thousands upon thousands of boxes of carefully pinned and lovingly recorded specimens of Lepidoptera—butterflies and moths.
Like the Turner, these boxes were monumental works of art. But unlike the massive Turner seascapes I’d loved, these boxes had been squirreled away for decades in hundreds upon hundreds of protective climate-controlled drawers. Assembled by compulsive butterfly addicts who worked in isolation in rooms and jungles and labs worldwide, some boxes dated to the eighteenth century.
The artists who made them obviously combined a deep passion for color with a meticulousness for detail. These kaleidoscopic assemblages represented hundreds of lifetimes of devoted labor by men and women hunched over their desks, working with a steadiness of hand and of intention that I could only dream of.
More than four decades after my life-changing love-at-first-sight view of a Turner, I was stunned all over again. I wanted to see more.
And more.
There was a lot to see. Yale has literally hundreds of thousands of butterfly and moth specimens. The boxes are cosseted in drawers that run from floor to ceiling, in line upon line of cabinets, in the expectation that someday, somewhere in the universe, whether in our own Milky Way or beyond, some researcher, perhaps yet unborn, will need them for a study.
Neatly pinned in meticulous rows, entire trays were devoted to only one species. The best of these boxes also note when and where the samples were collected.
Gall patiently pulled tray after tray after tray of butterflies. Just as with Turner’s painting, I struggled to make sense of what I saw. Who knew that trays of dead insects could be so delicious, so sensuous, so entirely luscious?
Eventually Gall, himself an addict, wearied of me and my incessant “Why this?” and “Why that?” I was politely, gently, but definitively dismissed.
And so I learned that the butterfly effect (to repurpose a term) is real, that this craving for color so deeply hardwired in our brains could turn into an addiction. What had been an arms-length inquiry into the unusual desires of certain lepidopterists had exploded into a compulsion of my own: What exactly were these odd flying creatures, some so small as to be almost invisible but others with foot-wide wingspans?
Like most people, I was no stranger to butterflies. Butterflies had been my companions for most of my life, as I rode horses through high Rocky Mountain valleys or over rich wildflower-filled Vermont fields. They were common in the Pennsylvania meadows where I grew up, as they were when I lived in Senegal or traveled in Zimbabwe or Kenya or South Africa. Everywhere I walked among weeds and wildflowers, butterflies fluttered. As I hiked Appalachia’s mountain trails, or strolled the beaches of Cape Cod, butterflies were there.
Of course I had seen them. Of course I liked them. Who doesn’t? But I took them for granted. I hadn’t really looked at them. Not closely, that is. Where did they come from? Why were they here? What the heck do they get up to while they’re on our planet? And what is it about them that compels the human psyche so insistently that men and women have risked their fortunes and their lives and, on occasion, died in order to capture them?
My curiosity was about to take me around the world—sometimes literally, sometimes by reading or talking on the phone with a multitude of scientists who knew exactly what I meant when I told them about my lepidopteral epiphany. As the veil lifted from my eyes, an entire universe opened to me.
I learned that the language of butterflies is the language of color. They speak to each other using that flash and dazzle. I sometimes imagine them as the world’s first artists. Happily for us, humanity finds joy in that same language of color. We have an ancient partnership with these six-legged life-forms that has helped us survive throughout our 200,000-year planetary presence.
Butterflies continue to partner with us even today. I learned that the seventeenth-century study of butterflies revolutionized our understanding of nature and thus provided the foundation for the field of scientific research we now call ecology. I also learned that this foundation was laid down by the research of a highly methodical, meticulous thirteen-year-old girl.
I learned that unlocking the secrets of butterflies helped us understand how evolution works, that their partnership with other living things forms the basis of life on our planet, and that butterflies today are helping us in many practical ways, improving our own lives by providing surprising new models for medical technology. For example, butterfly scales are helping materials researchers biodesign devices to help asthma sufferers.
All these surprises whetted my curiosity. When I started this project, I thought that writing about butterflies would be a simple matter. I was wrong. Butterflies are wonderfully complex beings that have evolved for well over 100 million years. Excitingly, while we have recently made great strides in unlocking their secrets, some of their unique attributes have yet to be understood.
Sadly, I also learned that, for a multitude of reasons, butterfly and moth population numbers are dropping, sometimes precipitously. There are many reasons for this decline and many actions that can be taken to prevent further losses. I learned that the disappearance of butterflies would be a planetary disaster, and not just for esthetic reasons. Their essential services keep the entire system intact.
Luckily, science has already achieved a great deal when it comes to butterfly conservation—so there is hope for the future. Hundreds of researchers worldwide and thousands of dedicated butterfly groups are making a difference.
In this book, we’ll find out how.