Insectarium Butterfly Pavilion
Donation protected
The Insectarium Institute needs your support for a new Butterfly Pavilion in Philadelphia.
We are working to add an 8000 sq. foot butterfly pavilion to the rear of the Insectarium Institute museum. This space will serve as a center for community education and program headquarters for our Save the Monarch initiative. Our seminar series will teach students and residents about the 69 native species of butterflies in Philadelphia and show them how they can help save our dwindling monarch population. Our programs will detail the current causes of anthropogenic mediated monarch decline as well as explore the natural stressors this organism faces. Our monarch OE survey class will monitor the parasite load on natural local monarchs as well as the thousands that we will be raising in our pavilion. Once we certify that we are raising healthy butterflies, we will be releasing them into the wild. We are working with local and regional, private and state organizations to plant hundreds of thousands of milkweed plants in the natural spaces around greater Philadelphia area so that the butterflies we release will be able to reproduce and thrive. Adding the butterfly pavilion will afford us the facilities to effectively raise these native butterflies and return them back into the environment. The pavilion will be host to these native species as well as 12500 plants and insect friendly birds, creating a warm rainforest environment for our visitors to enjoy the natural beauty of the butterflies. With your support we can bring a much needed educational exhibit that will help further the native butterfly population and support the declining Monarchs.
Who We Are
The Insectarium Institute is Philadelphia's primary center for entomological education.
Since 1992 the Insectarium has been educating adults and children alike, right here in Northeast Philadelphia, about the fascinating world of arthropods.
What We Need
We need $275,000 dollars in order to create a butterfly exhibit and living environment. These funds are distributed among construction, horticultural needs, lighting, heating, cooling, décor, fees and other items needed to bring the Butterfly Pavilion into a beautiful reality.
Help Us Help the Monarchs
The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is one of the most iconic insects in the United States. Quite different than its reviled cousin the cockroach or its disease spreading kin the mosquito, the monarch is a much beloved resident that can be found across the country and even up into Canada. Among the many unique and captivating behaviors this butterfly exhibits, perhaps the most well known is the great migration it makes every year. To pass the winter chill, populations east of the Rocky Mountains all flutter down to the same small mountain area in Mexico while those to the west of the continental divide turn towards the sunny shores of California and speckle the coastline in several little patches. Over one billion of these insects were estimated to have made this journey for the winter of 1996-1997 but due to a vicious combination of factors, only ~35 million are now believed to remain in North America. Just to restate that, in the past 20 years, ~95% of these creatures have vanished from our environment! The reasons for this range from habitat disruption due to conversion of natural areas into agricultural fields, to the increased use of herbicides which drift off the application site and kill the surrounding milkweed plants, to the unfortunate occurrence of severe weather events which impact large areas and result in massive die offs. I do not mean to make the monarch out to be some small creature, so fragile that a healthy breeze might send it to oblivion. Au contraire, this butterfly is a robust and fearsome organism, feeding on the poisonous milkweed plant and sequestering the toxic cardiac glycosides within it to defend itself against predation. But the synergistic stressors that are hurting this North American paragon are too powerful and threaten to push this creature into extinction. However, there is hope. Several governmental and private organizations are organizing efforts to help mitigate some of the problems the monarch faces. The monarch is far from the only animal that has found its self in trouble in our busy new world. There are numerous notable examples of endangered and recently extinct organisms from almost every taxa known to humans (the author of this admits he is unable to think of any endangered bacteria at the moment but you get the idea). On June 17th, 2015 the Eastern cougar (Puma concolor courguar) was taken off the endangered species list and officially declared extinct. This cat used to roam around New Jersey in the 1800’s. The monarch butterfly’s fate has yet to be determined. Don’t let this one go the way of the carrier pigeon, western black rhinoceros, or the Florida zestos skipper.
We are looking to open this butterfly pavilion this summer so that we can start our monarch remediation programs as soon as possible. In addition to education, we will be providing visitors to the Butterfly Pavilion with milkweed seeds and instructions so they can plant these host plants in there own gardens.
Please consider supporting the Insectarium and our Butterfly Pavilion, every donation helps!
Thank you,
John Cambridge
Insectarium Institute: Director of Operations
We are working to add an 8000 sq. foot butterfly pavilion to the rear of the Insectarium Institute museum. This space will serve as a center for community education and program headquarters for our Save the Monarch initiative. Our seminar series will teach students and residents about the 69 native species of butterflies in Philadelphia and show them how they can help save our dwindling monarch population. Our programs will detail the current causes of anthropogenic mediated monarch decline as well as explore the natural stressors this organism faces. Our monarch OE survey class will monitor the parasite load on natural local monarchs as well as the thousands that we will be raising in our pavilion. Once we certify that we are raising healthy butterflies, we will be releasing them into the wild. We are working with local and regional, private and state organizations to plant hundreds of thousands of milkweed plants in the natural spaces around greater Philadelphia area so that the butterflies we release will be able to reproduce and thrive. Adding the butterfly pavilion will afford us the facilities to effectively raise these native butterflies and return them back into the environment. The pavilion will be host to these native species as well as 12500 plants and insect friendly birds, creating a warm rainforest environment for our visitors to enjoy the natural beauty of the butterflies. With your support we can bring a much needed educational exhibit that will help further the native butterfly population and support the declining Monarchs.
Who We Are
The Insectarium Institute is Philadelphia's primary center for entomological education.
Since 1992 the Insectarium has been educating adults and children alike, right here in Northeast Philadelphia, about the fascinating world of arthropods.
What We Need
We need $275,000 dollars in order to create a butterfly exhibit and living environment. These funds are distributed among construction, horticultural needs, lighting, heating, cooling, décor, fees and other items needed to bring the Butterfly Pavilion into a beautiful reality.
Help Us Help the Monarchs
The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is one of the most iconic insects in the United States. Quite different than its reviled cousin the cockroach or its disease spreading kin the mosquito, the monarch is a much beloved resident that can be found across the country and even up into Canada. Among the many unique and captivating behaviors this butterfly exhibits, perhaps the most well known is the great migration it makes every year. To pass the winter chill, populations east of the Rocky Mountains all flutter down to the same small mountain area in Mexico while those to the west of the continental divide turn towards the sunny shores of California and speckle the coastline in several little patches. Over one billion of these insects were estimated to have made this journey for the winter of 1996-1997 but due to a vicious combination of factors, only ~35 million are now believed to remain in North America. Just to restate that, in the past 20 years, ~95% of these creatures have vanished from our environment! The reasons for this range from habitat disruption due to conversion of natural areas into agricultural fields, to the increased use of herbicides which drift off the application site and kill the surrounding milkweed plants, to the unfortunate occurrence of severe weather events which impact large areas and result in massive die offs. I do not mean to make the monarch out to be some small creature, so fragile that a healthy breeze might send it to oblivion. Au contraire, this butterfly is a robust and fearsome organism, feeding on the poisonous milkweed plant and sequestering the toxic cardiac glycosides within it to defend itself against predation. But the synergistic stressors that are hurting this North American paragon are too powerful and threaten to push this creature into extinction. However, there is hope. Several governmental and private organizations are organizing efforts to help mitigate some of the problems the monarch faces. The monarch is far from the only animal that has found its self in trouble in our busy new world. There are numerous notable examples of endangered and recently extinct organisms from almost every taxa known to humans (the author of this admits he is unable to think of any endangered bacteria at the moment but you get the idea). On June 17th, 2015 the Eastern cougar (Puma concolor courguar) was taken off the endangered species list and officially declared extinct. This cat used to roam around New Jersey in the 1800’s. The monarch butterfly’s fate has yet to be determined. Don’t let this one go the way of the carrier pigeon, western black rhinoceros, or the Florida zestos skipper.
We are looking to open this butterfly pavilion this summer so that we can start our monarch remediation programs as soon as possible. In addition to education, we will be providing visitors to the Butterfly Pavilion with milkweed seeds and instructions so they can plant these host plants in there own gardens.
Please consider supporting the Insectarium and our Butterfly Pavilion, every donation helps!
Thank you,
John Cambridge
Insectarium Institute: Director of Operations
Organizer
John Cambridge
Organizer
Philadelphia, PA
