JM: A fascinating collection of gynandromorphs
and the equally informative item on "a literary bug"*. The
photographs reminded me of the alchemical depictions of
Plato's androgyne. The blend of Van and Ada is doubtlessly of a
different kind but their fusion still suggests a platonic
ideal.
btw: there was an interesting polymorphous sentence about a
leopard lacewing at Reiman Gardens,when they informed that they'd
imported a crowd of pupae to populate the butterfly wing.**
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*A Literary Bug: Credit: Museum of
Comparative Zoology, ©President & Fellows Harvard College, photo by Mark
Sloan for Rarest of the Rare.
The author Vladimir Nabokov was an unofficial
curator of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) for Harvard's research
collection, and, in his autobiography, he recounts losing a prized gynandromorph
as a child when his governess sat on his collection: "… A precious
gynandromorph, left side male, right side female, whose abdomen could not be
traced and whose wings had come off, was lost forever: one might re-attach the
wings, but one could not prove that all four belong to that headless thorax on
its bent pin." Shown above is an unrelated gynandromorph blue morpho butterfly
featured in "The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard
Museum of Natural History" (Harper-collins Publishers, 2004).
** - One in 100,000+Credit: Nathan
Brockman, Reiman GardensIn almost nine years, Reiman Gardens has received about
163,116 pupae to populate its butterfly wing. But this leopard lacewing is the
only gynandromorph butterfly to ever emerge. Gynandromorphs likely go unnoticed
in species in which males and females look alike, so it is difficult to estimate
how frequently they occur.