MEXICO CITY— Two moths the size of a hand mate for hours hanging from a line amid cocoons like the ones they came from few hours earlier. Their wings striped brown and pink around four translucent areas.
“When I get here and find this, I jump with delight,” said María Eugenia Díaz Batres, who has spent almost six decades tending to insects in the Museum of Natural History and Environmental Culture in Mexico City.
Evidence that the museum’s efforts to save some 2,600 cocoons saved from an empty lot were well worth the effort was the mating pair of “four mirrors” moths as they are often known in Mexico, or technically as Rothschildia orizaba.
The moths, whose numbers have dropped in Mexico City in response to development, have cultural value in Mexico.
“The Aztecs called them the ‘butterfly of obsidian knives,’ Itzpapalotl,” Díaz Batres remarked. “And in northern Mexico they would fill many of these cocoons with little stones and wear them on their ankles for dances.”
Arriving at the museum in late December, these cocoons
“My first mission was to take them out, clean them, since they gave them to us in a bag and in a box and all squeezed together with branches and leaves,” Díaz Batres stated.
Since they had never seen something like this before, Mercedes Jiménez, director of the museum in Chapultepec park in the capital, said that is when the true adventure started.
Díaz Batres hung the cocoons anywhere she believed they would fit, including her workplace, from lines crossing above her table. It has let her closely monitor every stage of their development.
Although they only live for a week or two as adults, the moths provide Díaz Batres great delight particularly when she gets to her workplace and fresh moths “are at the door, on the computer.”
She thus works to enable them to “complete their mission,” and gradually their species heals.
