Audio report by Chris O’Gorman. Voices of Ed Bruggink, Greenhouse Manager; Fraser MacQuarrie; Events Co-ordinator from Let’s Talk Science and William Dunston; who was checking out the show with his family.
Carleton’s annual butterfly show opened Sept. 29 with big expectations for visitor turnout.
About 13,000 visitors came to see the butterflies last year, building supervisor and greenhouse manager Ed Bruggink said.
Carleton’s “wonderful greenhouse facilities” are what allows Carleton to showcase the exhibit every year, Bruggink said.
Unless you go to a museum and view dead specimens, there is no other place to see live butterflies in their habitat, said second-year biology masters student Andrew Mikhail, who helped put the exhibit together.
“There’s nowhere in Ottawa that you can see something like this,” Bruggink said.
The butterflies come from all over the world but are shipped from a collection in London, U.K., Bruggink said.
They are sent in chrysalis form between layers of cotton, then it’s “FedEx, overnight express,” Bruggink joked.
Four shipments arrived separately over the past few weeks so the butterflies don’t hatch at the same time, Mikhail said.
Bruggink said he hoped the weather would stay sunny since the butterflies won’t move unless it’s warm and with their two to three-week lifespan, the 14,000 butterflies from 40 different species will all live out their lives at Carleton.
The show will be run in conjunction with Let’s Talk Science, a national science outreach program, which will be taking groups of students and community members through an educational tour, according to Fraser MacQuarrie, coordinator of Carleton’s program said.
Running for 10 days, the butterfly show will end Oct. 8.
