The caterpillar does all the work,
but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
—GEORGE CARLIN
BUTTERFLIES ARE BEAUTIFUL, ethereal creatures. They’re fluttering tapestries of color, magically moving canvases, and tiny aerial dancers. We revere them in the form of tattoos, celebrate their shape in jewelry, and adorn ourselves with butterfly hairclips and T-shirts. Paper butterflies even festoon brothel rooms in India, as if to help to make the girls’ lives a bit more palatable.
Butterflies are everything we seemingly long to be, young and exquisite forever. They’re nature’s supreme work of art and had become Kojima’s sole obsession.
“Butterflies are the one bug in our society that people like because of the character traits we put on them. They’re colorful and pretty, they’re angelic and nice, and that makes them lovable,” explains Brent Karner of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
However, the real life of butterflies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They’re beset by creepy predators, eaten by birds, chased by humans, squashed on windshields of cars and caught in their grilles. Only 2 percent of the eggs laid by a female butterfly ever make it to adulthood. Perhaps because of this, many of them also have a dark side, along with rap sheets that can seem unbelievable.
Butterfly society is filled with various forms of brutality, from cannibalism and cyanide poisoning to molestation of minors and outright rape. They have more in common with humans than we might like to admit. Their actions can read like a tragic Shakespearean play. They’re Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear all rolled into one big chrysalis.
From the moment of birth butterflies display an aggressive side. Survival of the fittest is the motto of many of these young cannibals as comma-sized caterpillars munch away on their siblings. They furiously chew in the hope that they’ll turn into pupae before they themselves are eaten by birds.
If the youngsters make it that far, a worse fate possibly awaits them—the dreaded ichneumon wasp. The wasp perches on the back of a defenseless caterpillar and lays its eggs beneath the skin. Their offspring eventually hatch and feast on their host from within. In a nightmarish scenario, newborn wasps, rather than a beautiful butterfly, ultimately emerge from the chrysalis.
Other parasitic wasps detect the odor of a newly mated female butterfly and hitch an uninvited ride to her egg-laying site. There they proceed to parasitize her freshly laid eggs. Only one one-thousandth of her eggs survive.
Perhaps strangest of all are butterfly-mating rituals. We tend to romanticize these delicate creatures, but some of them can be downright cruel, participating in an act that’s nothing less than cradle rape. There are butterfly species so eager to find mates that they locate a female pupa and perch on it, sometimes four males at a time. Then they wait until the female emerges. That’s when she’s at her most susceptible. Her wings have yet to open, and she’s still limp.
Facing abdomen to abdomen, the first male’s claspers spring from his sides, exposing his penis. The claspers then grab hold of the female and pry open her genitalia. Once he’s finished mating, the rest of the males take their turn. The last male to mount is the one that fertilizes her eggs. He claims his prize by depositing a sperm plug, the butterfly equivalent of a chastity belt. That female is then unable to mate with anyone else. She may even be injured during the rape and die.
The Heliconius butterfly of Central and South America elegantly sports long, narrow black wings and dramatic yellow zebra-like stripes. The species is intelligent, with a brain twice the normal size of other butterflies. Large groups of them roost together on tree limbs at night. There they make an eerie creaking sound by wriggling their bodies to scare away predators—not that they’d have any problem. Their wings are loaded with cyanide.
Some Heliconius males take the act of rape to the ultimate extreme. They probe into the pupa of a different butterfly species and fertilize the female before she’s even had the chance to emerge. That always ends as a death sentence for the female.
It’s the monarch that most people think of when they have romantic visions of butterflies. The male flies about fluttering his orange-and-black wings in a scene of visual poetry. He spews pheromones, also referred to as “love dust,” to attract potential mates. Females eventually float by in a hormonally induced haze, and the male takes his pick, grabbing hold of one of their legs. Unable to fly, they fall from the sky and land on the ground, where the female tries to throw off her suitor. If the male withstands the battle, he lays his head next to hers and strokes it with his knobbed antennas. Once she’s been sedated, he flips her over and they mate. He then carries her to the treetops, where they remain until sunrise. The courtship appears to have all the elements of a best-selling romance novel.
“In reality, monarch courtship is brutal and bad,” states Gordon Pratt. “They’re the thugs of the butterfly world.”
Newcomer knew relatively little about butterflies, but he was beginning to understand more about Kojima. He had already guessed there was a dark side to the man.
He had yet to discover that he was in for the ride of his life.