The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World's Favorite Insect

Beautiful book, lots of info, easy to read

I approached this book warily. I had been contacted by the author when it was in the early stages of development--pre-Covid, seemingly eons ago--and we had a tentative agreement to get together but it somehow fell through, and I never heard any more about it until the book came out. So I bought it, not knowing what to expect.From the opening sentences it was clearly written from a breathlessly naive perspective; Williams admitted to no serious prior knowledge of butterflies, but she found everything she learned about butterflies to be wonderful. In fact, she was a quick study, and she manages to convey sophisticated concepts, like the photoperiodic regulation of life-cycle phenomena, in a manner comprehensible to the lay reader without "dumbing down" or condescension. She convincingly answers the hostile question put to me in a bar by a soused logger in Montague, California: "Studying butterflies? What the Hell kind of doodly-squat work is that for a MAN?" (As it happened, I had had a faceoff at close quarters with a rattlesnake a couple of hours before and was in no mood to play macho games with the guy.)Williams loves monarchs. (When she initially contacted me it was planned as a book about monarchs.) The book was written during the 2018 "monarch revival" when the eastern population unexpectedly doubled, giving the lie to the notion that its decline had been due to a milkweed shortage. Alas, the revival was short-lived. At this writing the Pacific Coast population is at an all-time low. No one really knows why. Pressed to do something, conservationists are advocating planting milkweed--which will not do any good, but presumably will do no harm--as well as propounding all sorts of nonsense that fits with the rhetoric of native-plant enthusiasts, such as the notion that the availability of tropical milkweed in gardens--which does not go winter-dormant--is somehow reponsible for the recent phenomenon of winter monarch breeding. Tropical milkweed has been available for over a century, but there was no winter breeding until perhaps a decade ago, even in Southern California. The availability of tropical milkweed merely enables, not causes, winter breeding. Overwintering monarchs, as Williams describes, are supposed to be in reproductive diapause (dormancy), which is photoperiod-induced. Since photoperiod cycles have not changed, something else must have. That something else is almost certainly climate: photoperiodically-controlled phenomena are regularly modulated by temperature (basically, warmer nights have to be longer nights to have the same effect). That's a testable hypothesis. So is the idea that monarch populations, along with a great many other insect species including butterflies, are being depressed by the flood of neonicotinoid insecticides. That's harder to test: correlation famously does not equal causation.As I write this (Feb.1, 2021), someone just found a large monarch larva in Vacaville, Solano County, California, to my knowledge the farthest inland that winter breeding has been observed regionally.When I have taught adult-education classes, my students (usually seniors) have often expressed amazement that butterflies have intense sex lives. That somehow had never occurred to them! This book should be an eye-opener for them, though I must admit that my late friend Dame Miriam Rothschild went a bit overboard when she anthropomorphized the behavior of horny male monarchs!Williams also overdoes her praise of Maria Sibylla Merian, who has become something of a faddish feminist icon. What she did was remarkable enough, without overstating its scientific importance. She did not "discover" the metamorphosis of butterflies--her contemporary Jan Swammerdam usually gets the credit, though one assumes many a medieval peasant knew the story. And her paintings of butterfly life-histories do not signify that she "invented" ecology. (Some of them are downright inaccurate. Linnaeus and his pupil Johanssen misnamed two tropical American butterflies based on her inaccurate pairing of them with plants they in fact do not feed on. And the very plate Williams alludes to (pp.56-57) is misleading. The caterpillar and empty pupal case portrayed are not those of a Morpho at all (the butterfly portrayed), and the plant shown (pomegranate) not only is not a host but is not native to the Western Hemisphere at all. While Morphos have secondarily radiated onto a variety of dicotyledonous host plants, Lythraceae (Punicoidea) do not seem to be one of them. (They are primitively monocot feeders.) Which is not to rule out it being an acceptable host in captivity )One more cavil: the discussion of genitalia (p.136) misses the mark. Male genital structures in butterflies and many other organisms are consistent indicators of species status. (This is not true of female genitalia!) This has been known since 1844 and the reasons for it have sparked very lively debate. The most persistent notion has been that such species-specific variation mechanically prevents successful interspecific mating. This is traditionally called the "lock and key" hypothesis. It can be justified evolutionarily in a very convincing way, but there are two problems with it: (i) the "key" is species-specific but the "lock" is not, and (ii) when tested empirically, it doesn't seem to work. The most prevalent notion nowadays is that the male anatomy affords specific stimuli to the female during mating, much as the barbs on the feline intromittent organ induces ovulation in pussycats. This would have made an excellent and outstanding chapter in Williams' book. It's a pity she missed it.I can, however, say that she clearly read and "got" the literature I sent her back when.

Butterflies are pretty. They're also symbols of freedom, of floating on air, of beauty. But until I read "The Language of Butterflies," I had no idea just how fascinating they are. This book explains in a series of entertaining stories how butterflies have evolved over at least the last 56 million years, how their antennae guide millions of them to specific locations in annual migration, why they are so brightly colored, how such fragile creatures survive winters at 12,000 feet and maintain their energy while flying 2500 miles. Along the way, we meet all sorts of interesting people who have devoted their careers to studying the cabbage whites, pygmy blues, pearl crescents, Delaware skippers, and great spangled fritillaries. The names alone will make you smile. You'll love this book!

The Language of Butterflies is a fact-filled personal take on the past, present, and future of butterflies. Wendy Williams takes the reader on her exploration and research as she connects their significant role in our understanding of nature and science. This book gives us timely insight into evolution and climate change. Her facts often caught me by surprise—who knew the poison in the monarch’s only food source,!milkweed, makes them unpalatable to predators if it isn’t fatal to the butterfly!

I love this book. Some of the science was over my head, but very interesting. The experiments that were conducted regarding how they make that flight or ingenious. Butterflies do not sip nectar from flowers they absorb it with their proboscis. If you have any interest in the monarch butterfly I highly recommend this book. Enjoy