The butterflies get their own home in the Botanical Gardens

Lots of butterflies now flutter around in their own house in the Botanical Gardens. The insects with the scaly wings in flashy colours have fascinated writers, artists and scientists since antiquity.

According to a press release the Butterfly House will give a boost to the research garden’s communication, and to the experiences it offers. The Botanical Gardens are the home to more than 10,000 species of plant, so the butterflies will hopefully also get a good experience.

The opening reception for the Butterfly House was on Thursday 28th June and the doors opened to the public on Friday 29th June.

The world’s population of butterflies has dropped dramatically.

The public will be able to study the butterflies as examples of millions of years of evolutionary history in interaction with plant and animal species, and where appearance and behaviour are a constant adaptation to their surroundings. They are at the same time a research asset for the Botanical Gardens.

“As indicator species, the butterflies give us a clear message on how even tiny changes in living conditions such as a small temperature change and lack of access to food affects populations,” says museum director at the Botanical Gardens Peter C. Kjærsgaard.

“In many places in the world butterfly populations have been dropping dramatically, and we are losing animal and plant species all the time and at a pace that can be compared to previous large mass extinctions in the Earth’s history – with the last one about 66 million years ago,” says Peter C. Kjærsgaard.

Humans play a central role in this context, he says. The Butterfly House is the Botanical Garden’s local contribution to the attempt to turn this trend around.

The Botanical Gardens is a part of the Natural History Museum of Denmark that is a part of the University of Copenhagen.