Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

October 25, 2002

Doing her thing in the butterfly wing

Mary Harris is preparing for the opening of the new butterfly wing. Photo by Bob Elbert.

by Debra Gibson
The look on her face is vintage Christmas morning -- eyes lit, smile wide with anticipation. Mary Harris clutches the just-delivered box, and seconds later is poring over its contents with an expression close to reverent.

Who'd have thought parasites would be such a draw?

For Harris, an entomologist long specialized in integrated pest management, these microscopic mites mean the difference between feisty foliage and puny plants for the Reiman Gardens' new conservatory and Christina Reiman Butterfly Wing. These newly arrived predatory mites are packed alongside such biocontrol agents as beetles, lacewing eggs and a brown sticky substance resembling peanut butter that contains voracious nematodes. With any luck, their appetites will eliminate disease in most of the nearly 1,000 plants located in the two facilities.

But the deliveries that goad Harris into positive giddiness are those arriving daily from around the globe, meticulously labeled with governmental acronyms and serial numbers. These thickly padded boxes contain small, brown, leaf-like chrysalids that will evolve into the hundreds of butterflies that will soon take flight in their new wing.

Seeking swallowtails
As curator of the butterfly wing, Harris has hand-picked the 435 species that will be represented, over time, in the facility. Her search required hours on the Internet, identifying "every butterfly rancher in the world and every species commercially produced," Harris said during a recent interview. A quickly sketched map of the world is thumb-tacked to the divider that defines her cramped cubicle in one corner of the new building. On that map, Harris has marked the origins of her incoming butterflies -- Asia, Africa, Central America, Australia, the Philippines, North and South America. Beside the map is their delivery log for this fiscal year -- at least one shipment each week from now through next June.

When the wing opens in early November, Harris hopes to have 1,000 to 1,500 newly hatched butterflies in flight. More routinely, about 800 such insects should be in residence at any given time. At an average cost of $2.50 per pupa and a typical butterfly lifespan of roughly 2 1/2 weeks, "you do the math," Harris said with a laugh. "There's our biggest factor in maintaining a butterfly wing -- we are constantly replenishing."

Along with rearing specialist Nathan Brockman, Harris has begun work growing some species on-site to maintain the population and defray some costs.

Madame Butterfly
The California native has expanded her resume considerably since assuming the curator position earlier this year. Harris undertook a crash course in U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) bureaucracy and tightened security while completing permit applications for USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service and Plant Protection and Quarantine requirements. ("I submitted the longest species list ever received for their policies," Harris explained with a laugh.) And she's become a design and construction aficionado as well.

For instance, the butterfly house was designed with sharp corners in its high ceilings. Knowing that butterflies instinctively fly up when they encounter vertical surfaces, Harris determined that the insects would cluster in the highest corners of the building rather than fly throughout its spaces. The facility now is outfitted with netting to keep the winged ones at lower altitudes, and also to prevent them from being caught in the condensation that occasionally may build up on the glass walls.

Preventing the inhabitants from busting out of the joint was another challenge for Harris, since "adult butterflies will use any possible escape route," she explained. Consequently, screening panels now cover every vent and drain.

Hatching a new plan
The facility's original design included a display case for visitors to observe the actual emergence of the butterflies from their chrysalids. Unfortunately, existing incubators, resembling refrigerators, were too large to fit into that space and were not built with glass exteriors.

With Harris's assistance, engineers at Percival Scientific in Perry, the world's foremost manufacturer of such incubators, designed new custom emergence cases, or incubators, that allow facilities to control their environmental parameters better. Harris anticipates that these new cases "are setting an industry standard," and soon will be used in butterfly houses around the world.

Pretty impressive work for a scientist who used to be all about woodpeckers.

The entomological emergence
Back in the mid-1970s, Harris enrolled at UCLA with plans to become a veterinarian, then eventually chose wildlife biology as her major. She entered graduate school at the University of Montana and studied habitat use among woodpeckers in forest burns, earning a master's degree in 1982.

"But woodpeckers eat insects," Harris said in explaining her classification transformation. She enrolled at the UC campus at Riverside and earned a second master's degree in integrated pest management, working with a professor who specialized in floracultural biocontrol.

She went on to serve as head of the biological control division for Yoder Brothers Inc. in Florida and to develop biocontrol practices for greenhouses. Harris earned her Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Georgia, where she created several butterfly gardens.

A winged wonder
It was while she and her husband, John Nason, assistant professor of botany, were on the faculty at the University of Iowa that Harris first became affiliated with butterfly houses. During the summers of 1997 and 1998, she advised and coordinated a temporary exhibit for the Iowa City Area Science Center.

"I remembered thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to work from the ground floor up on building a permanent butterfly exhibit," Harris recalled. "Who would have thought that one line on my vita, under community service, would have led to this job?"

According to Harris, the Christina Reiman Butterfly Wing is one of only about 35 such permanent facilities in the nation.

"I think it's the most amazing thing that this facility is located in a community the size of Ames," she said. "The butterfly house in Chicago is only about 200 square feet larger than ours. It's so wonderful for Ames to have this real jewel."