Igor Semenovich Zakharzhevsky is one of the oldest geologists of Krasnoyarsk, as well as a well-known collector. During his life, he gathered a large collection of butterflies and carefully kept it at home. Now the entomology fan is already 93 years old, and he decided to donate his butterflies to the Forest Ecosystems Museum of the Forest Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Siberian Branch, with which he collaborated for more than 20 years. We went there to admire the beautiful creatures and learn more about their lives.

The zoological collection of the museum is kept in a special room in the building of the Forest Institute. Here, in the boxes and shelves are dry straightened insects - flies, beetles, butterflies. According to the head of the museum, the head of the laboratory of forest zoology, Candidate of Biological Sciences Yuri Baranchikov, more than a thousand copies from more than 40 different families are on the list that Zakharzhevsky provided together with his collection. His gift was a significant contribution to the existing collection of the Institute.

 

Generally speaking, all butterflies can be divided into two large groups - night and day ones. The day ones are also called rhopalocera​ ("with club-like antennae")  - the antennae of daytime Lepidoptera end with a “club”. As for night butterflies, they look different: females have flagella, males have brushes. These things are needed to capture the pheromones that females secrete.

Butterflies, which are included in the large collection, were personally gathered during many years. Usually they are caught with a net, but Zakharzhevsky was known among his colleagues-entomologists for catching them in a can which already had soporific ether inside it.

You need some more skill to catch the night butterfly – they are attracted by light — so, you'll need an ultraviolet lamp or an ordinary incandescent bulb. Two stakes are set, white canvas is pulled over them, and a lamp is placed above it. Butterflies land on the fabric, where they can be collected with a net, can or tweezers.

To put the caught butterflies in the collection, you first need to straighten them. To open and fix the wings of one butterfly, you need a special device and at least 15 minutes of time. The smaller the butterfly, the longer. Ideally, the angle between the axis of the body and the bottom of the front wing should be 90 degrees, the insect is dried in such position and then put in a collection box. Under the butterfly, two labels are crammed - one tells, who caught it and where, the other - the species name, and who identified it.

Zakharzhevsky himself kept the collection at home in self-made demonstration boxes, that were previously used for his geological equipment. Dried insects can be stored for a long time, but they can suffer from carpet beetles - tiny beetles that feed on dry insects. They are in every home - often they can be found in products or on the windowsill. Now, to save the collection from insects, special plates have been placed in the boxes - they release insecticide vapors and kill uninvited guests.

 

Like other herbivorous insects, all butterflies are born from eggs laid on a food plant. The caterpillars hatch and feed on this plant. Its shell is rich in chitin; it does not allow to grow, therefore, the insect​ during its life sheds 5-6 times. The period that butterflies spend in the body of a caterpillar usually does not exceed one, less often two months. Some species, such as the Siberian silkworm moth, can live in the caterpillar stage for 2–3 years and even pass the winter in this form.

At the end of development, the caterpillar turns into a pupa, and then into a butterfly. A hatched butterfly must find a vertical or inclined surface and gain a foothold on it. It is necessary for the wings to be filled with hemolymph and spread with the help of gravity.

 

“I often recall a ridiculous case — a student from a university wrote a thetis on how the pollution of a city affects butterflies using the example of a white satin moth. They collected pupae, placed them in Petri dishes and butterflies hatched there. And the butterflies were with deformed wings. There was even a publication that said that the city had such a terrible ecology that poor butterflies would hatch in a deformed state. But if they had tilted this cup and allowed gravity to work, the butterflies would all have been normal. There’s nothing to do with pollution here, just the lack of information,” says Yuri Baranchikov.

 

After their transformation into a butterfly, insects live for quite a short period of time. Some species, such as the Siberian and unpaired silkworms, do not even feed in the butterfly stage. They can live no longer than a month, and that only if there is a cloudy weather and the insect is inactive.

According to the scientist, there are species of butterflies that cause obvious harm to humans. For example, the Machaon butterfly, which is in the Red Book, is quite popular in Krasnoyarsk. The caterpillar can eat vegetables from the garden - carrots, cumin, dill. one more example of a pest butterfly is Pieris brasssicae (cabbage butterfly) - a European species that first appeared in Siberia 30–40 years ago, at about the same time as the Colorado beetle.

In the past two years, our region has several centers of mass reproduction of the Siberian silkworm. Pine needles are completely eaten by silkworm caterpillars, which makes the trees die.

- They eat greens completely, there are completely bare forests for hundreds or thousands of hectares. If it is larch, the trees can still produce secondary needles by the end of the season, but in case of cedar or fir-trees, they will die, and very quickly. The last outbreak that happened last year captured about a million hectares of silver-fir in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Region. Russian Federation has allocated half a billion rubles to process the forests of the region to protect them from the silkworm, a lot has been written about this in the media,” says Yuri Baranchikov.

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It is believed that butterflies bring benefits - they collect nectar from flowers and thus participate in pollination of plants. However, scientists say that the merit of butterflies in this is overvalued.

"There are a lot scientific papers, proving that. Basically, butterflies steal nectar. Bees and bumblebees really take part in pollination - they climb inside the flower and crawl out completely covered with pollen. Butterflies don't do that, they act as surgeons - keep their distance and reach into the flower with a proboscis. Of course, they can pick up some pollen, but this is not really much compared to the merits of bees. Therefore, as a rule, butterflies are thieves, but beautiful ones," says Yuri Baranchikov.