Perhaps you have eaten farm-raised salmon? Most of us usually don’t think of fish as something to be farmed. This book takes that idea a bit further with farm-raised butterflies. This 10″ X 9″ book opens up to end papers of 6 compartment sections each filled the a different variety of life-size butterfly pupae! Gorgeous!
A Boston museum receives a shipping box of live butterfly pupae from Costa Rica. The reader sees the box before and after it is opened. The text goes on to tell the life cycle of a butterfly accompanied by a diagram. A few pages later, ” Unlike most mother butterflies, this one lives in a greenhouse. She was moved here from the nearby forest so that she could lay her eggs inside the greenhouse’s tall, screened walls.” ( page 9) So begins the photo essay of butterfly farming. Appropriate vocabulary is used to describe the life cycle as it unfolds on this farm : exoskeleton and molting. The larger than life color photos show the pupae color patterns and hairlines in great detail. As the pupae mature, some will be released back into the local forest, some will be kept to the next life cycle to begin over again inside the greenhouses, and the majority of them will be shipped to museums, etc. around the world. The reader is shown a well organized lab setting with the numerous varieties of butterfly pupae sorted for shipping, then a shipping package, and the live cargo being readied to board the airplane, while the text explains a few of the finer details.
The book ends with some general information- “INSECTS AND THEIR LIFE CYCLES” and “INSECT WORDS”. The former describes complete, simple, and partial metamorphosis each in an easy to understand paragraph. Then the latter, gives general life cycle terminology first, followed by more specific terminology for three different insects:
egg -> larva-> pupa-> adult
egg-> caterpillar->chrysalis-> butterfly
egg->maggot->pupa-fly
egg->grub->pup->beetle.
Includes: a glossary with cross-references to photos in the book, information for a free download, books, and websites.
This 10″ X 9″ book closes to end papers of 6 compartment sections each filled the a different variety of life-size adult butterfly ! Gorgeous!