The Hidden Butterfly Trade

Sitting at what was once Vladimir Nabokov’s desk in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, graduate student Zhengyang Wang spent hours pouring over the final details of insect anatomy. Nabokov, like Wang, was a keen-eyed entomologist, enraptured by butterflies.

The celebrated 20th-century novelist and young evolutionary biologist are, of course, not the only ones afflicted with this particular fixation. Butterflies and their images have flitted through cultures and mythologies for millennia, and still exercise a powerful hold on contemporary fancies. These delicate insects are perhaps the most extensively traded animals on the planet. In an unnatural migration, their iridescent wings stilled, they soar (or steam) across oceans and continents, possibly by the hundreds of thousands, each year.

But just how many are traveling, or , butterflies pass invisibly through X-ray scanners at international ports of entry.