Dialogue with the Butterfly

The Lighter Side of Human Nature

 Dialogue with the Butterfly

"I cannot reach for the rainbow,

neither can I make one,

but you, by your wings and wand,

build the biggest crown."

Dr Abe V Rotor

Exquisite netted venation of a butterfly wing, representing nature's architecture universal in the insect world, flying foxes, leaves of most plants, and blood vessels in human and other creatures.

Author's daughter, Anna, is amused by friendly butterflies at a botanical garden in Bangkok, Thailand.

Life cycle of the butterfly - from egg to caterpillar to pupa to adult - the butterfly.

Fly me to your world, oh butterfly,

where flows the Pierian Spring*,

the fountain of youth eternal,

where Syrphids dance and sing.

I'd rather wish to be in your garden

foe and friend yet we're one,

where the tree of knowledge blooms,

nurtured by rain and sun.

I cannot reach for the rainbow,

neither can I make one,

but you, by your wings and wand,

build the biggest crown.

Your sense of beauty’s not ours,

fleeting and elusive,

ephemeral to your senses all,

before it is perceived.

Just for once, oh butterfly, to leave

the home of my ancestor,

I shall cease to ask another favor

nor crave for more.

Then I shall fly no more in your garden;

the flowers will die with the fountain,

and all that lives shall crave the same

with nothing to hope and gain. ~

*In Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring of Macedonia was sacred to the Muses. As the metaphorical source of knowledge of art and science, it was popularized by a couplet in Alexander Pope's 1711 poem "An Essay on Criticism": "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." Wikipedia

Cryptobotany - Strange Images of Trees

Trees for Peace

Cryptobotany - Strange Images of Trees 

Some cryptobotany may well be pseudoscience, 

but it is also true to say that some "respectable" 

botanists are cryptobotanists...  - MacRusgail

Dr Abe V Rotor

Kaohsiung, Taiwan 

Re-incarnation - this elephant tree had been

once roaming around in band;

threatened, endangered and gone, 

what would it become the next time around? 

St Paul University QC

Young devil tree, but you aren't;

your eyes but holes to your heart;

your arm raised to praise, to call

a friend, such is nature's art.

UST Manila 

Shadow of death I see across the lawn,

save the sun all mourning;

haunting the playground empty and quiet,

save a dead tree walking. 

 

Driftwood Serpent on display at the Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

Rising from a forest long gone;

drifting aimlessly in the sun,

hidden unknown in the sand, 

the like of a monster found.

Driftwood Duck-like Creature, Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

Happy or sad this driftwood duck

many features it may lack,

its horn and bill make me laugh, 

but its message's enough.

Skull and eyes of a tree,  Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

Are trees human, too?

A question its answer is No,

'til you come face to face

familiar no other but you.

Cryptobotany: Review of Literature
Cryptobotany or cryptophytology is a field related to cryptozoology, dedicated to the study and search for formally undescribed plants. Due to their nature, cryptid plants are far less common than cryptid animals.

• Cryptid plants are generally reported from inaccessible tropical regions, and many are carnivorous plants, such as man-eating trees or vampire plants. There is no single dedicated work on cryptobotany, but the largest collections of information regarding carnivorous cryptid plants are contained in Karl Shuker's The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003) and Roy P. Mackal's Searching for Hidden Animals (1980).

• Bernard Heuvelmans stated in the foreword to A Living Dinosaur? (1987) that his proudest achievement related to the Congo dragon cryptids was cryptobotanical: in Les Derniers Dragons d'Afrique (1978), based on advice from Armad Bouquet, he had correctly identified the plant described as the mokele-mbembe's favourite food, "a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits," as a species of Landolphia. A sample of the liana collected two years later was identified as Landolphia mannii. (Source: Cryptozoology Encyclopedia, Internet)

• "I object to the allegation that cryptobotany is a total pseudoscience. This is totally POV. Maybe the article (not this article) has things the wrong way round. Some cryptobotany may well be pseudoscience, but it is also true to say that some "respectable" botanists are cryptobotanists, since they are looking for unknown or hidden (crypto) plants. Someone who looks for rare orchids is as much a cryptobotanist as someone who looks for man-eating trees. There is just an artificial boundary that creates a false division between the two." --MacRusgail (talk) 10:45, 15 October 2008 (UTC) Wikipedia ~

The Garden as Entomology Laboratory (San Vicente Botanical Garden 2)

(San Vicente Botanical Garden 2)

 The Garden as Entomology Laboratory

Dr Abe V Rotor

NOTE: 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. I updated this article at the San Vicente (Ilocos Sur) Botanical Garden (Living with Nature Center) early this year. 
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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.

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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.


Artistic representation of a damsel fly, Museum of Natural History, Mt Makiling Botanical Garden, UPLB Laguna
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 immature 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. 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.

A Walking Stick, a perfect example of mimicry. 

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.

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.

Green Bug

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.

Light of Dawn

First Book of Miss Genevieve V Andrada

on her 18th birthday

"For God who gave me my talents, 

With love and gratitude to my parents,

To those who believed in what I can do,

Where would I be now without you?

And for those who have yet to discover,

The wonder of words with many fields to uncover." 

- viva andrada

NOTE: A very beautiful prayer and dedication, filled with humility, 

gratitude, respect and optimism. - a v rotor

A University of Fish

A University of Fish

"Humans call it a school - a university, the key to unity and harmony."

Painting and Verse by Dr Abe V Rotor 

A School of Fish in acrylic by Dr Abe V Rotor 2017

Courtesy of BANNAWAG Managing Editor Cles B Rambaud

A school of fish in the dictionary, 

    big and small alike in company,

in unity towards stability, 

    living members of one big family. 

From a school into a university,

    attended by not just one specie(s),

enhances knowledge in diversity, 

    in the many corners of the sea.

Here Lola Basyang tells us a story,

    Balagtas recreates a scenery,

Leona Florentino into poetry, 

    a touch of Rizal's Noli and Fili.

Einstein sees matter in relativity,

    others in web and flow of energy,

each a kind of school, air, land and sea,

    microbes all, in virtual infinity 

All creatures attend school that is free,

    from ones home to the community,

we, humans call it a university,

    the key to unity and harmony. 

Move over Sir Darwin from your theory,

    move over scholars of history;

man will never solve this great mystery 

    of life, and why we're here to stay. ~

 

 

Light on Damascus Road

Light on Damascus Road

Mural Painting and Poem by Dr Abe V Rotor

Saul falls from his horse on the road to Damascus. Mural 

Painting (8ft x 8ft), Former St. Paul University QC Museum, 1995

The sky wakes up with the tempest,

Lighting the rocks which barred his way,

Dwarfing the boldest Roman conquest

On a lonely road far, far away.

“Saul, Saul,” comes a voice divine, pleading,

There’s no one yet he feels of Someone;

His legion is now beyond hearing,

Kneels this great warrior and nobleman.

“Why do you persecute me?” He’s mute.

From the clouds a beam of light comes out.

Rising, he is face to face with truth,

His heart bleeding, his light dies out.

He waits the fangs of abyssal depth

That bestows the hopeless false kindness

Relief and escape of those near death;

But Saul weathered the test of darkness.

A full turnabout from Saul to Paul,

Renouncing fame whatever the cost,

Protector is he, light of lost soul,

To die for Christ, a true martyr’s cause.

The book and sword of this apostle,

Today’s a symbol at the Gentiles’ gate,

Where lay inner peace far from hustle,

That lights man’s way to a blessed fate.~

"Carpe diem." Seize the day with the camera

"Carpe diem." Seize the day with the camera

Looking for a subject to make your day?

Here are samples. (Unscripted and unedited for authenticity and naturalness)

Dr Abe V Rotor

"Fleeting, fleeting,

seize life with the lens,

for the world awhirling

now and thence." - avr

A clown comes to town

Texting, a new pastime

Music calms tired muscles and nerves

Posing with colleagues, Bannawag Magazine

Youngest chef

Kainan na, Vamos a comer

Flying carpet to a child

Preparing for exam with the greats

Welcome to the Christian world

Making a tree happy

Mimicking the wind mill

Oversize helmet

Janus' mask

Dried flower bouquet, anyone?

The eucalyptus bears the proverbial gold leaves!

Trees for Peace

The eucalyptus bears the proverbial gold leaves!

The eucalyptus bears the proverbial gold leaves - pure gold particles one-fifth the diameter of human hair embedded in the leaf veins!

Dr Abe V Rotor

 

Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus), relative of the macopa (Eugenia jambalana) and duhat (Syzigium cumini) under Family Myrtaceae, Lagro QC

This towering eucalyptus, Eucalyptus globulus, dwarfs the adjacent barangay hall, covered court, and high school buildings, yet she is unassuming. Her lanky nature with dull green foliage with a tinge of blue flimsily hanging like the weeping willow (Salix sp), does not stir much attention of passersby, not even residents around. No, she does not exude the regal pose of the narra (Dipterocarpus indicus), the Philippine national tree; the shady crown of the acacia (Samanea saman), the biggest legume in the world; and the coconut (Cocos nucifera), the miracle tree. Paradoxically all these trees occupy the same compound, the center of barangay activities.

Even as the wind blows the eucalyptus has little confetti to throw, few notes to whistle, little shade to draw on the ground. Yet she is a living Panacea, the Greek goddess of universal remedy from insect bite to asthma to alleviation of mental and physical fatigue. Her leaves have virtual cure-all power: antiviral, antibacterial, anti-fungal, and they exude volatile oil into the air and even as they lay on the ground. She keeps at bay vermin from mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, flea, ticks, to rodents. Yet, unlike other pesticides, the volatile oil of eucalyptus is refreshing, soothing to the lungs, increasing oxygenation and blood circulation.

Why, indisposed feelings are gone! That pep is back! Where have all the flies gone?

If there is a tree that is a must in the neighborhood, better on the backyard, it is this goddess tree Panacea.

But wait, there is a hidden treasure in the leaves of eucalyptus, the proverbial "gold leaves," as shown by this photomicrograph. Gold vein! Microdeposits of pure gold. This new discovery is more important in gold prospecting where eucalyptus grows, indicating deep beneath the earth lies a "pot of gold." Asked if it's worth collecting the leaves for gold - Australian scientists wryly said no. The amount is too little to be worth the effort. Well, gold is gold.

Every time I look at a eucalyptus tree I see Panacea holding a gold leaf. ~