I had a dream the other night. I was working at my desk, when suddenly, cabbage white butterflies (like the one in the picture) started raining down all around me, dead or dying. I tried to save them, but I couldn’t move. I screamed, down on my knees; a long, drawn out, “Nooooooo!”. It was very dramatic – think Charlton Heston at the end of planet of the apes, when he finds the statue of liberty and realizes he was on Earth all along (spoiler alert!).

Then I woke up. As my dog Darwin realized I was awake and started licking my face, the thought occurred to me that it was one of those dreams that you wake up from, but then once you’re awake you realize that what you were dreaming is really happening. At least allegorically – like the dream was a big metaphor for my life.

Spring this year was cold and wet, and most of the butterflies decided to sleep in until midsummer. They are out now, but as far as I can tell, they are still not common. Perhaps they hide from me, scheming little butterfly schemes.

I need to raise a whole generation in captivity if I want to use them for research, so when I catch females, I try to get them to lay eggs. Sometimes they do lay eggs. Sometimes they don’t lay eggs. Often they just die, lying on their sides and breathing laboriously (metaphorically again – insects don’t have lungs) in their little white mesh butterfly houses with their potted plants and sugar-water feeders.

Most research projects I’ve worked on involved watching animals in the wild, collecting them temporarily and then re-releasing them, or analyzing data that other people had collected. None of these were easy. Nevertheless, I think that simultaneously raising a number of butterfly species in captivity, and trying to keep them happy and healthy, is one of the hardest things I’ve tried yet. Perhaps the worst part is having to continuously rethink my plans. It’s amazing how hard one can think and plan for something, but then when you actually try to DO it, everything immediately falls apart.

Learning that all your preconceptions were actually misconceptions is pretty normal for science, and probably for life in general. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Learning is hard. For now I’ve got some good ideas of what to try next, lots of help and advice from my mentors and friends here, and a lot of adult butterflies provided by some very nice people that should help me out by laying the next generation of eggs. Fingers crossed!

Next time I post I’ll try to get into why I even want to raise butterflies in the first place.