Butterfly Flight in Slow Motion!

This is an owl butterfly, and what you're about to see is an extraordinary moment in its life. It hasn't yet flown. In fact, it hasn't even flapped its wings yet. It's hanging onto the chrysalis from which it emerged as an adult butterfly just hours before. Its common name, owl butterfly, comes from this. The two giant eye spots that give a shocking impression of the eyes of a much larger animal. That butterfly is from the tropical forest of Central America, but it emerged from its chrysalis, and I filmed it flying here in North Carolina. In this museum, we have a walk-in exhibit that we call our Living Conservatory. The point of this exhibit is to create an immersion for visitors to experience a tropical habitat where they feel that they are actually walking into the forest. In this room, we have several living animals. We have a sloth, we have several turtles in the center bed, we have a snake, but our most numerous species we have in the room are butterflies, of course. As the butterflies come in, we pin them up to these strips and hang them inside of a climate-controlled emergence chamber. So we get about 300 butterflies every other week shipped to the conservatory from Costa Rica, which the public can view from the outside. These butterflies on top, they take a little longer for their pupation period, so they are just now starting to come out, as you can see in this blue morpho on top. Watching an adult butterfly emerge is mesmerizing, and it's a time-lapse video sequence I've always wanted to film. So, I spent three days testing setups and eventually captured this sequence. First out is a blue frosted banner. Once the adult squirms free of the pupil case, it hangs around, inflating its body and its wings by circulating fluids. Next is a heliconious longwing. And last, a monarch. The conservatory is a place to experience these insects close up, but even with the relatively slow wing flapping of butterflies, it's hard to appreciate what they're doing without a slow motion camera. So, here's a collection of sequences I captured by filming at 1300 and 3200 frames per second. These are two species of longwings in the genus Heliconius. A thing I noticed about their flights is how actively they swing and move around their long abdomen when they get into the air. Watch in this sequence when the butterfly does a mid-air change of direction with a downbeat of the wings and an upswing of the abdomen. This is one of the most iconic tropical butterflies, a blue morpho. When this one lifts into the air, you might notice something a little strange. It's not alone. It's dragging behind a mate, still coupled together. A lot of insects do this, flying around as an attached mating pair. I've tried to capture this before while filming flies, but I could never get a good sequence. So, I was shocked to capture these. It's incredible to me that only one of the butterflies does all the work in lifting their combined weight. Here's a view of the brightly colored underside of the wing of a malachite. There's also the checkerboard eye patterning and the contrasting colors of the top side of the wing as it lifts off. Finally, this cattle heart waves its front legs around before springing into the air. One of the best things about our living conservatory is it might be one of the only ones in the country that's totally free. There's no admission charge to get in this museum, and there's none to get in that particular exhibit. So, next time you're in North Carolina and we're past all the COVID restrictions, be sure to stop in and visit with the butterflies. Thanks for watching.