Butterfly houses open window to insect world : Growing public interest has produced a swarm of new exhibits. But the industry bugs some government officials.

Michael Weissmann’s quest to teach children about the importance of insects once meant traveling to rural schools across Colorado with a cockroach in his shirt pocket and boxfuls of bugs in the backseat of an old Volkswagen Super Beetle.

“When the car didn’t break down at 2 a.m. on a back road, it was a great job,” recalled the 35-year-old entomologist. “In three years, me and my bugmobile taught thousands of kids to appreciate insects and not squish them.”

Now the bugmobile (red with black ladybug spots) sits in the parking lot of a new Butterfly Pavilion in the Denver suburb of Westminster. Weissmann is the curator, and 20,000 people a month come to him for a wildlife experience that no zoo can match: full contact with exotic species.

“You want lions, tigers and bears--go to a zoo,” Weissmann said as children swooned over 2,000 flashy butterflies and furry moths flapping over their noses in a setting designed to resemble a tropical rain forest. “Our mission is arthropods. Our strength is our bugs.”

The Butterfly Pavilion is one of at least 30 that have cropped up in the United States over the past eight years. Many more are on the drawing boards in what has become one of the hottest trends in the nation.

Much of their popularity derives from a growing public interest in saving the world’s rain forests. That concern has already moved 60 zoos and aquariums to build walk-through rain forest exhibits.

Unlike zoos, butterfly houses are relatively inexpensive to operate, almost always profitable and create an interactive natural environment for human visitors and small organisms that is impossible to duplicate with large animals.

In what essentially amount to large greenhouses filled with tropical plants and vines, butterflies are becoming ambassadors for an otherwise unattractive group of creatures--insects--that make up the richest assortment of species on Earth.

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The butterfly-house industry is blossoming so fast that the Interior Department, in cooperation with the Peace Corps, recently dispatched entomologists and economists to Honduras to teach villagers how to create butterfly ranches and then sell the insects in the U.S. market.

The goal is to provide the villagers with a sustainable crop--butterflies--that does not require the destruction of the Honduran rain forest, while educating Americans about the complex relationships in natural communities.

But the Agriculture Department does not necessarily share the Interior Department’s optimism about the benefits of that effort.

The Honduran experiment is at odds with federal laws enacted to keep exotic insects out of the country, said Agriculture Department officials caught off guard by the explosive growth of butterfly houses.

Five years ago, the USDA received five requests a year for permits to open exotic butterfly exhibits. Now, with 10 such requests a week, the agency is racing to forge rules to prevent an eco-outbreak that could harm crops in the United States.

Robert Flanders, senior entomologist for the USDA’s animal and plant inspection service, said, “While we are authorized to keep exotic pests out of the country, we are getting requests to import several hundred species of exotic butterflies for educational and entertainment purposes.”

As it stands, 60% of the agriculture pests in the United States were accidentally introduced from other countries.

“The first escape of exotic butterflies that causes harm to soybeans or beets or some other crop could cause this whole industry to collapse,” Flanders warned. “We will not put North America at risk.”

Entomologists who work with butterfly houses say the threat of a plague of Frankenstein butterflies and caterpillars emerging from these pavilions is close to zero. This is partly because the bulk of the butterflies being imported from Asia, Central America and South America are tropical varieties that could not survive temperate climates.

In addition, federal agriculture officials require complete containment--no place for butterflies to lay eggs--and importation of only those species whose caterpillars could not survive by feeding on native plants and crops.

The Butterfly Pavilion currently is permitted to import 116 varieties. The 16,000-square-foot facility spends $72,000 a year on chrysalids--a type of pupa--obtained from butterfly ranches in Malaysia, the Philippines, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Florida.

The pupa are hatched in carefully controlled rooms equipped to detect and destroy pathogens and parasites that sometimes arrive with them in boxes packed with foam rubber.

Among the delicate rainbow-hued stars that emerge from these shipments are zebra longwings, scarlet mormons, blue morphos and paper kites, which have a slow, gentle flight behavior reminiscent of paper floating in air.

“We want things that are showy, graceful fliers and behave well in captivity--we don’t want glass-smashers here,” Weissmann said. “After all, we still get that rare person who is afraid of bugs, and we don’t want them to get alarmed.”