Taiwan Today

Taiwan is consolidating its fame in Europe as the kingdom of butterflies.

The Taipei Zoo has again found itself to be playing a significant role in Taiwan’s effort to improve relations with the world, especially in the past several months. Although the two giant pandas from mainland China have received a great amount of attention, the zoo has also shipped thousands of butterfly pupae to four European countries for exhibition, starting in Poland at the end of last September, followed by shows in Sweden in January, Hungary in February and then Denmark in March this year. “These exhibitions are part of Taipei’s city-to-city diplomacy and they’re platforms through which visitors can learn more about Taiwan’s natural environment in general,” says Wu I-hsin, curator of the zoo’s insectarium.

At each of the exhibitions, along with the literature from Taipei Zoo regarding Taiwan’s rich butterfly diversity, the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture did its part to boost Taiwan’s image by providing posters promoting Taiwan’s 18 National Forest Recreation Areas and the natural beauty of its scenic areas.

“It’s fitting to let the world know about Taiwan’s beauty and its unique environment through its butterflies,” said David Liu, representative of the Taipei office in Poland, at the opening of the exhibition in Wroclaw, a major city in the southwestern part of the country. In Taiwan, there are more than 430 species of butterflies, including 50 endemic species. This translates to 123 species per 10,000 square kilometers on the island, compared with an average of six species for the same area in Japan.

The high diversity of the beautiful creatures owes much to Taiwan’s unique geographical features: On the 36,000-square-kilometer main island there are 133 peaks higher than 3,000 meters. Warm and humid and straddling the divide between tropical and subtropical regions, such a place is naturally ideal for the development of various kinds of butterflies. “We have butterflies from these climatic regions and because of the high mountains, we have temperate climate species too,” Wu I-hsin says. In addition, European butterflies in general do not look as colorful as those from Taiwan. “The colder the climate is, the smaller the butterflies are in size, such as those in Europe, which is generally colder than Taiwan,” she adds.

Except for Taiwan’s five protected species including the Magellan’s iridescent birdwing, which is found only on Orchid Island, and the endangered broad-tailed swallowtail, all other kinds of local butterflies can be shipped abroad for exhibitions. Large-sized butterflies are usually the most popular, however, such as tree nymphs and common windmills. Orange oak leaves are also impressive because of their unusual form mimicking a withered leaf.

The pupae of different species must be sent abroad at different times, since they develop into adults at different times of the year; some swallowtail butterflies, for example, do not reach adulthood until the end of the winter.

Some of the pupae are from the zoo’s butterfly breeding room, but the majority of them are from a private farm in Puli in central Taiwan. The zoo pays an average of NT$100 (US$3) per pupa, depending on the species. For the recent European shows, zoo employees mailed 100 to 200 carefully packaged pupae at a time, which later developed into adults with a lifespan of between 20 and 30 days. They are usually sent via express delivery lest they die or hatch before reaching the recipients. “You have to keep the package warm because the delivery time is in winter, but you can’t keep the pupae in stuffy conditions. That means you have to make the flight as short as possible,” Wu explains.

Worth the Effort

All the hard work that goes into preparing these delicate insects for transport is worthwhile, however, as the overseas exhibitions rarely fail to leave an impression on Western butterfly lovers. “Taiwan is in a very good situation. This is an isolated island with so many endemic species,” says Gabor Csorba, a Hungarian zoologist and advisor to the exhibition in the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest. The museum already had built close relations with Taiwan, sending Csorba and other researchers to Taiwan many times since 1996. The Budapest exhibition set up a special section to display specimens collected in Taiwan by Hungarian researchers. “Our main purpose was to discover and describe the huge diversity of Taiwan’s fauna, including insects and mammals. Finally, the most complete and exciting collection turned out to be that of the butterflies,” he says. The exhibition was so impressive that the Mora Ferenc Museum in Szeged, the largest city in southern Hungary, has shown great interest in organizing such an event and is in talks with the Budapest office of the Government Information Office (GIO) to schedule a show for May 2010.

Meanwhile, Taiwan used the recent European shows as a chance to publicize its efforts in butterfly conservation. At the exhibition at Copenhagen Zoo’s Tropical House, Charles Liu, representative of the Taipei office in Denmark, spoke to local media about the measures taken since 2007 by his government to ensure the smooth annual migration of purple crow butterflies in southern Taiwan. Copenhagen Zoo is the most popular such institution in northern Europe, attracting 1.4 million visitors in 2008.

Similar exhibitions of live Taiwan butterflies were carried out on a smaller scale in 1998. Through Chen Keh-miin, the then information secretary at the Munich office of the GIO, a butterfly house in Neuermarkt in southern Germany learned about Taiwan’s butterflies and hosted an exhibition in June 1998 with the insects hatching from 250 pupae flown from Taipei Zoo. The Munich Botanical Garden soon followed suit in November that year, exhibiting live butterflies for five months that developed from a total of 750 pupae, along with 34 paintings of Taiwan’s butterflies by Chiu Chen-tsung, an artist known for his vivid portrayals of Taiwan’s insects.

“In countries like Germany with a temperate climate, there aren’t so many kinds of insects and butterflies, especially during the winter,” Wu I-hsin says, explaining the German institutes’ high interest in cooperating with Taipei Zoo. Sure enough, the Munich exhibition of exotic insects from the Far East proved to be a great success, attracting tens of thousands of visitors.

The months-long event has since been held in the Munich Botanical Garden three times, the most recent being in 2004 when officials from Taipei Zoo and Taipei City Government attended the event’s opening ceremony for the first time. Taipei Zoo staff members also visited the municipal zoo in Nurnberg, Germany at the time, paving the way for future cooperation with that organization. In March 2006, Taipei Zoo announced its Nurnberg counterpart as the second of its four sister zoos around the world. As the friendship has developed, the German zoo has given Taipei Zoo red-necked wallabies, Chinese crocodile lizards and a hyacinth macaw, which Wu notes ranks alongside giant pandas as one of the most endangered animals in the world according to the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of World Fauna and Flora. For its part, Taipei Zoo sent hundreds of pupae, already one of its signature gifts to international institutions, for the first time to the Nurnberg municipal zoo for a five-month exhibition starting at the end of 2006, which attracted some 90,000 visitors.

As for the 2008-2009 events, Chen Keh-miin, himself a dung beetle aficionado, says he hoped the shows would help more Europeans learn about Taiwan’s butterflies. The butterfly exhibits turned out to be so popular that Taipei Zoo is thinking about holding other kinds of ecological exhibitions on insects such as fireflies. This would be rather challenging, however. “The pupa stage of fireflies is shorter than butterflies and they are even more delicate and sensitive to their surroundings,” Chen says, explaining why the transport of the insects is a big concern. Wu I-hsin says that a firefly show would also need more insects than a butterfly exhibit. “You can’t create a good visual effect in a dark room without using at least 5,000 fireflies, each of which costs about NT$40 (US$1.20) to buy, so the expense of such an exhibition is higher than that of butterflies,” she says.

Butterfly Industry

At any rate, Taiwan’s live butterfly shows already have drawn significant attention abroad, which is expected not only to boost Taiwan’s international visibility, but also bring economic benefits. Actually, the “butterfly industry” has already played a role in Taiwan’s economic development, peaking in the 1960s when butterfly specimens and handicrafts made from butterfly wings were a major source of revenue for many families, especially those in Puli. “The specimens went to Japan and handicrafts like coasters and butterfly-wing mosaics to the West,” says Yeh A-hua, the owner of the Puli farm that has been providing pupae to Taipei Zoo.

Yeh says that “everybody was busy catching butterflies in my hometown in the 1960s” and selling them to nearby butterfly-processing factories, notably the one that was later converted into the Muh Sheng Museum of Entomology in 1974 and still operates as a tourist spot in Puli. During the boom years, about 47 processing factories were involved and tens of thousands of people relied on the insects for a living.

Like many other labor-intensive sectors, however, the butterfly industry started to decline as Taiwan saw ever-growing labor costs and found it hard to compete with Southeast Asian countries, which also are rich in populations of butterflies. That was when the Puli farm decided to change course by breeding butterflies and exporting pupae, mainly to London, about 20 years ago. However, it was not long before the pupae export business again faced pressure from price competition by butterfly farms in Southeast Asian countries. About 10 years ago, Yeh expanded her farm in scale and upgraded its facilities, around the same time that Taiwanese people were becoming more and more interested in ecotourism and visiting nature-related destinations like butterfly houses. Her butterfly farm thus survived and is currently the largest of the four providers in Taiwan of adult butterflies as well as pupae.

Today, the exposure Taiwan’s butterflies receive through government-supported exhibitions might lead to larger pupae exports in the future. “There’s little financial reward from exports currently, although I’m glad I’m doing my part boosting Taiwan’s image abroad,” Yeh says. “The profit would be substantial if we could receive orders for large amounts of pupae,” she says. The farm owner is confident that after years of research, she now has a definite competitive edge against her counterparts abroad when it comes to exporting pupae. “There’s a much higher chance--maybe 90 percent--for the pupae from my farm to develop into adult butterflies,” she adds.

The benefits bestowed by the island’s butterflies are apparently without end. Blessed with such a diversity of these colorful insects, people in Taiwan should be grateful for and protective of this gift of nature that not only enriches the island’s ecological environment, but also helps its people by means of diplomatic and economic rewards.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw