Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio polytes)

 Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio polytes) 

Dr Abe V Rotor

Frass-like caterpillars of Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio polytes)

feeding on citrus leaves.  Photo by the author.

Obnoxious I look and smell no one dares to get near,
much less to pick me neither by beak nor tongue,   
for my enemies are few, so my friends - if I know;
you see, if you are ugly and dirty no one bothers you,
like anyone else not excluding some humans;
but in my case Nature designed me this way, 
and she thinks I'm beautiful, to me it is a gift of life;
surviving in a cruel world.  I rest now and someday
I'll metamorphose into something beautiful 
in the eyes of humans, so beautiful and dainty

no one will ever ask what I was before. ~

Live and mounted specimens of Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio polytes)
The swallowtail butterflies represent the grace and free nature of the 

human soul. They are associated with hope, endurance, change, and life. 

Photos and artwork by the author. ~

Raise the lily flowers high

 Raise the lily flowers high

Dr Abe V Rotor

     White lily (Fleur de liz), emblem of Saint Paul of Chartres congregation

When the world is down and one looks up to heaven,

Many hands, big and small, raise the lily flowers high;

When the path is thorny and rough and uncertain,

Flowering lilies near and far take away your sigh.

And when the summer sun torches the earth dry,

Lilies bloom while other creatures go to sleep,

In pure delight offer the world in war and grief,

Hope and peace, and comfort for those who weep. ~

Fight for a Cause, a peerless chance.

                                  Fight for a Cause, a peerless chance. 

Dr Abe V Rotor

                                            No, not a mob adrift with the current;

fight for a Cause, a peerless chance;

 death the cost, but the meaning of your life,

while you walk here on earth but once. 

   Acknowledgement: Internet photo

Spontaneity in Art Reveals Natural Beauty

Living with Nature 

Spontaneity in Art Reveals Natural Beauty 

"Spontaneous art reveals Nature's beauty,

with man's conscious and sub-conscious state,

at peace and quiet, reverence and piety."- avr

Paintings and Verses by Dr Abe V Rotor

A flower in its demise, dies that a new life emerges - in fact a whole offspring many times over in number. Nature's art sets the theme of many a work of artists, they themselves would never have thought of before.  

"Light - its particle-wave property

enables the eye to see

the universe's great mystery."

 - avr

A maze is but a scene gone wild and when captured on canvas or screen suggests an idea akin to one's experience and imagination, such as these galactic representations somewhere in the universe - or under the microscope.   

"With red, blue, and yellow,

   nature creates the rainbow,

  with prism of light through,

  that an image comes true."

 - avr

What is black is not emptiness, but the result in proportional ratio of the primary colors - red, blue, yellow - combined by the power light.  In the process these colors create limitless possible combinations seen by the eye, depending on the organism, invisible rays, mirage, auroras affecting vision, notwithstanding.  

"Travel inside a leaf, other than into space, 

 One small step for man,

a giant leap for mankind - 

      the farther you go into an unknown place." - avr

A leaf in the palm of your hand, or seen as chloroplasts under a powerful lens, freshness of spring, green meadow and hill - captured and nestled in the mind, heart and soul, reflect true peace, "Peace is always beautiful," says Walt Whitman

"A Blade of Grass, Whitman says,

     magnificence of Nature's ways." - avr

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection." - Michelangelo

How superstitious are you? "People with large ears live long."

  How superstitious are you? Here is a checklist.

  "The balete tree (Ficus benjamina)  is home of bad spirits." 

Dr Abe V Rotor 

             Vampire bat

Check those items which have scientific bases to qualify them outside the realm of superstition. 

1. Angalo is the legendary friendly giant among the Ilocanos.
2. Avoid laughing when planting kamote otherwise the roots will become liplike.
3. Bathing the cat will cause rain.
4. Bats swoop on unwary people.
5. Bite your finger after you have pointed at somebody, so that the blame will not boomerang.
6. Black ants on lansones means the fruit is sweet.
7. 
   Bringing salt under a sour fruit-bearing tree will cause the fruits to fall.
8. One can read how nature intended plants to be used by examining their resemblances and other physical characteristics.
9. Cassava grown from inverted cutting is poisonous.
10. Cat grooming at the doorway tells of visitors coming. 
11. Cockroaches eat on anything - almost.
12. Conceiving mother who gets near a fruiting tree causes its fruits to fall prematurely.
13. Eating shark influences human character with the animal’s behavior.
14. Food offering on special occasions is homage to the spirits.
15. Fruit trees watered with sugar solution bear sweet fruits.
16. Garlic drives the aswang away.
17. Hanging bottles on the trellis of gourd plants induces fruiting.
18. Harelip or cleft lip is the result of an accident when the baby was still in the womb.
19. If a Fortune plant received as a gift bears flowers, it is a sign of good luck.
20. Inadvertently wearing reverse clothes leads one to marry a widow or an old maid.
21. It’s customary to first spill a little of your wine in deference to the spirits. 
22. It’s lucky to find a four-leaf clover.
23. Kugtong or giant lapulapu – does exist in deep rivers and lakes.  
    
24. Mother who eats twin bananas will bear twin children.
25. Mothers place the extracted tooth of their children under the pillow or mat so that the good tooth fairy will come and replace it.
26. Nakakapagpagaling ang laway sa nausog (A little saliva relives someone who was chanced upon by the unseen.)
27. Old folk’s advice: Don’t forget to spit on the spot where you answered the call of nature. 
28. One who is fond of rice crust (tutong) is lazy.
29. Papaya planted in front of a house brings bad luck.
30. People with large ears live long.
31. Place the first fruits harvested from a plant in a large container and pretend to carry them as if they were very heavy so that the plant will be heavy with fruits.
32. When planting a tree seedling, avoid looking up so that the plant will not grow very tall. Stoop when planting coconut so it bears nuts early.
    
33. Chicken soup is best for convalescent. 
34. Rice is the first thing to carry with when moving to a new house.
35. The balete (Ficus benjamina) PHOTO is the home of bad spirits which cause those who go near the tree to become sick. ~

All of the above items are superstitious beliefs.

The Garden - Microcosm of the Insect World ( "The smallest creatures often hold the key to the grandest mysteries of our ecosystems." )

 The Garden - Microcosm of the Insect World

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate... If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." — E.O. Wilson

                                                         Abercio V Rotor PhD

     Retired Professor in Entomology

       UST-GS, DLSAU, DLSU-D, SPU-QC

Entomology (study of insects) is best studied in the field in order to gain on-site and hands-on experience. A school garden, such as the UST Botanical Garden Manila serves the purpose for regular field work. Ideally, schools with sprawling campuses are ideal. Ateneo de Manila University for one, and University of the Philippines Diliman, and of course, UP Los Banos in Laguna. 

Daddy-long-legs, relative of the mosquito, quakes continuously when at rest by swaying its body back and forth in all directions, causing blurred view to a would-be attacker, and mesmerizing a potential prey. In the open, such optical illusion is enhanced by the shadow of the moving organism. Note the hind pair of wings reduced into halteres or balancer, characteristic of Dipterans. There is another kind of daddy-long-legs which belongs to Arachnida.

With increasing population, traffic and commerce all around a community, there is one place, a garden, that offers a wildlife sanctuary, specially insects. Here they live freely in the trees and shrubs, on annuals, inside the greenhouses, around the ponds, in loamy soil, and in the shade of buildings, and even visit homes seeking a suitable abode.

I have the feeling that of all animals, insects are the most adapted to the varied aspects of human activities, from the sound of hurrying feet to soft echoes of prayer and hymns – and loud music. When there are humans around, insects feed on morsels, paper and crayons, drink on fruit juices and beer. They aestivate in flower pots and boxes to tide with the harsh summer months. Or hibernate when the cold Siberian High comes. I think Pavlov’s conditioned learning works with insects as well.

Interestingly, as an entomologist, I have been monitoring the insects in some gardens, listing down a good number of species that include those not readily found elsewhere. These include a giant click beetle, a rhinoceros beetle with horns resembling a triceratops, Ficus pollinating wasp, leaf-curling thrips of ikmo, long horned grasshoppers, sulfur and Papilio butterflies.

Well, it is a fact that there is no escape from insects - good or bad ones. In terms of species, there are 7 insects out of 10 animal organisms of earth. Insects comprise 800,000 kinds and scientists estimate that their kin - lobster shrimps, spiders, ticks, centipedes, millipedes and scorpions if these were to be added, the phylum to which they all belongs, Phylum Arthropoda, would comprise 80 percent of all animals organisms. To compare, plants make up only one-half million species.

What secrets have insects in dominating the animal world, and surpassing the geologic history of dinosaurs, fishes, mammals and even some mollusks?

Well look at the ants, termites, and bees, the so-called social insects. Their caste system is so intact and strict that is was long regarded as a model of man’s quest for a perfect society. It inspired the building of highly autocratic empires like Egyptian and Roman Empires, and the monarchial Aztecs,       Inca and Mayan civilizations.

Antlion's traps. The predatory larva of this Neuropteran (Dendroleon obsoletum) lies buried at the bottom of the pit waiting for an unwary ant to fall and become its meal. The adult resembles the damselfly.

Take the case of the butterflies and moths. Their active time is not only well defined - diurnal or nocturnal, but their food is highly specific to a plant or group of plants and their parts. Their life cycles allow either accelerated or suspended metamorphosis depending on the prevailing conditions of the environment, a feat no other animal can do more efficiently.

In an outdoor lecture around a garden pond, I explained  the bizarre life of the dragonfly, once a contemporary of the dinosaur. Its young called nymph is a fearful hunter in water as the adult is in air. Apparently this is mainly  the reason on how it got its legendary name. I showed our visitors mainly students about the weapons of insects: the preying mantis carries a pair of ax-and-vise, a bee brandishes a poisonous dagger, while a tussock moth is cloaked with stinging barbs, a stink bug sprays corrosive acid on eyes or skin. The weevil has an auger snout, the grasshopper grins with shear-like mandibles, and the mosquito tucks in a long, contaminated needle.

We examined a beetle. Our thought brought us to the medieval age. A knight in full battle gear! Chitin, which makes up its armor called exoskeleton, has not been successfully copied in the laboratory. So with the light of the firefly, the most efficient of all lights on earth.

Wait until you hear this! Aphids, scale insects and some dipterans, are capable of paedogenesis, that is, the ability of insects to produce young even before reaching maturity!

Numbers, numbers, numbers. This is the secret of survival and dominance in the biological world. King Solomon is wise indeed in halting his army so that another army - an army of ants can pass. Killer ants and killer bees destroy anything that impedes their passage, including livestock - and human.

Invisibility is another key to insect survival and dominance. Have you examined the inside of leaf galls in santol, Ficus and ikmo? Well, you need a microscope to see the culprit - thrips or red mites. I demonstrated to guests how insects, being very small, can ride on the wind and current, find easy shelter, and are less subjected to injury when they fall. Also, insects require relatively less energy than bigger organisms do. All of these contribute to their persistence and worldwide distribution. Insects surely are among the ultimate survivors of a disaster.

In an article I wrote, A Night of Music in a Garden I described Nature’s musicians, the cricket and the katydid. While their sounds are music to many of us they are totally coded sounds similar to our communications. 

A Walking Stick, a perfect example of mimicry.

Cicadas, beetles, grasshopper, have their own “languages”, and in the case of termites and bees, their language is in the form of chemical signals known as pheromones. It is from them that we are learning pheromones in humans.

"The smallest creatures often hold the key to the grandest

mysteries of our ecosystems." — Rachel Carson

Without insects, we are certain to miss our sweetest sugar which is honey, the finest fabric which is silk, the mysterious fig (Smyrna fig) which is an exotic fruit. We would be having less and less of luscious fruits, succulent vegetables, the reddest dye, unique flavor in cheese, and most likely we will not have enough food to eat because insects are the chief pollinators, and main food of fishes and other animals. They are major links in the food chains and food webs, the columns of a biological Parthenon.

Without insects, the earth would be littered with dead bodies of plants and animals. Insects are the co-workers of decomposition with bacteria and fungi as they prepare for the life of the next generation by converting dead tissues into organic materials and ultimately into their inorganic forms. Together they help bridge the living and the non-living world.

                                                         Green Bug

A garden without bees and butterflies mirrors a scenario of the biblical fall. And if the other creatures in that garden strayed away from its beautiful premises as our first forebears began their wandering, they too, must have learned the true values of life, which they share to us today.

Beautiful is the verse from A Gnat and a Bee, an Aesop fables. To wit:

“The wretch who works not for his daily bread,

Sighs and complains, but ought not to be fed.

Think, when you see stout beggars on their stand,

The lazy are the locusts of the land.”

In The Ant and the Grasshopper, Aesop, acting like a father with a rod in hand, warns. He was referring to the happy-go-lucky grasshopper.

“Oh now, while health and vigour still remain,

Toil, toil, my lad, to purchase honest again!

Shun idleness! Shun pleasure’s tempting snare!

A youth of rebels breeds age of care.”

Ecologically insects are the barometer of the kind of environment we live in. A pristine environment attracts beneficial insects, while a spoilt one breeds pests and diseases

. 

I have yet to see a firefly in a city garden. I remember an article in Renato Constantino’s series of publications, Issues Without Tears. Its title is, You don’t See Fireflies Anymore, a prophesy of doom, a second to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Maybe. But I have not lost hope. Someday, a flicker in the night may yet come from a firefly and not from a car or cigarette - if only others will share with me the same optimism. ~

Ficus pseudopalma and its exclusive wasp pollinator, a classical example of co-evolution. Only this species of wasp can pollinate and subsequently fertilize the introverted flower of this fig plant. Wasp is magnified 20x under a stereo microscope.~

"In the intricate dance of nature, insects are the choreographers of biodiversity." — E.O. Wilson

Movie Parade at UST, 2011 Grand Quadricentennial Celebration (1611-2011)

                                    Movie Parade at UST, 2011

 Grand Quadricentennial Celebration (1611-2011)

The Quadricentennial Celebration of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) was a multi-year series of religious, cultural, academic, and infrastructural events held from December 18, 2009, to January 27, 2012, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the pontifical university's founding on April 28, 1611, by Archbishop Miguel de Benavides, O.P., as Asia's oldest existing institution of higher learning.[1][2] As the largest Catholic university in the world by enrollment on a single campus and a key center of Dominican scholarship, the celebration emphasized UST's enduring mission to integrate faith, reason, and service, while highlighting its historical role in Philippine education, including as the sole higher learning institution during Spanish colonial rule and its designation as a National Historical Landmark. AI Overview
                      

     Photographs and Verse by Abercio V Rotor, PhD

Professor (Retired), UST Graduate School and Faculty of Arts and Letters

     

                              Local movie on the life of Rizal, an alumnus of UST                                     

Movies took over the stage,

created make-believe players;

from arena to theaters,

cinema to home screen

these hundred years.

How technology spanned

live drama and celluloid,

Charlie Chaplin and Lucas,

Carl Jung and Simon Freud,

the young and the very old.

Hollywood to Bollywood,

white actors to colored,

aristocracy giving way

to realism on the road,

in stories simply told.

This is not all. It is just

the start of the future

which we live in today -

postmodern culture

in cyber adventure.

Movies, movies, movies

defy classification,

on Internet, television,

from studio to home video,

AI and virtual animation.

Quo vadis, movie?

where are you headed for?

for whom are you made

as we had known before,

at the local shore?

Is this a sign of demise,

of the movie, the classical,

movie, the great adventure,

movie, the historical,

true and ideal?

Movie does not speak,

or we just can't hear anymore,

under the heap of this strayed art

yearning not for more,

but for some quality score. ~

A popular movie animae

Scary theme, musical treatment

Witches walk the campus

Alice in Wonderland

"Good triumphs over evil."

Shrek and Company

2012 - Year of the Dragon

Pirates of the Caribbean

Avatar

The University of Santo Tomas (UST) in the Philippines is known as Asia's oldest university (founded 1611), a prestigious Catholic research institution with Pontifical and Royal titles, a massive campus, and a reputation for producing influential alumni, strong performance in licensure exams, and vibrant cultural life, especially its dance troupes like Salinggawi. AI Overview