Mini Course – finally LEARNING about the butterflies we kill

Back in IVIC I found that we do in fact have housing! We are staying in Casa #1 which is closer to the Centro de Ecologia where we have classes and work. It’s really nice, a little bit smaller and more personal than the last place, although there is no (easy) access to the roof which is sad. Yully (a friend from the course, from Colombia) lives there, as well as me, Louise (from the UK), Javier (Spain), Antoine (France), and Rudy (lives in NY but Dominican nationality), so it’s a pretty diverse group. Because the house is so small, we are making friends as well with a lot of the other people staying here (mostly girls that Javier and Antoine attract with their irresistable good looks and accents). It seems that I will be staying here until my flight (on the 25th) and working for me room and board by helping to enter data into the computers about the butterflies that we caught. But first, we got a two day course to learn something ABOUT the butterflies!

It’s hard because it was a very accelerated course, but I have learned that there are generally considered to be between 5 – 7 families of butterflies, divided into the Hesperiids (which kinda look like moths, with a really thick body and generally rather bland colors) and the Papilonids (which is all the rest). You can tell if something is butterfly or moth because butterflies have balls or some sort of bump on the end of their antenna, while moths are just straight and generally tapering toward the end. Within the Hesperiids there is only one family, Hesperiidae. Within Papilonids there is Papilonidae, Pieridae, Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, and Nymphalidae (most of the butterflies). Some of the most common subfamilies within Nymphalidae are Danainae (monarchs), Biblidinae (my favorites, many big green or black ones), Morphinae (the big huge strickingly blue ones-morphos), Satyrinae (brown boring ones), and Nymphalinae (pretty much the rest). And that’s what I know about butterflies!