Love bugs

UNO researchers Carla Penz and Phil DeVries have made a life-together-of watching butterflies and other bugs around the world.

By Darv Johnson

To understand how a man from Michigan and a woman from Brazil could end up sharing a laboratory dedicated to butterfly research at the University of New Orleans-and a home in Metairie-it helps to know a couple of things about them.

When Carla Penz was just a chrysalis, barely 10 years old, she had already decided to be a scientist, and spent her days collecting shells, or breeding mosquitoes to feed her pet carnivorous plants. A few years earlier and 6,000 miles away, a young Phil DeVries, still a caterpillar, in diapers, was riveted-riveted!-by the progress of an ordinary ant.

Such early focus-two children so intent on the natural world, so comfortable with bugs-goes a long way toward explaining how DeVries and Penz, newly hired professors in UNO's biology department, have mutually arrived in the upper echelons of Lepidoptera research. Their work, pursued both independently and as a team, runs the gamut from tightly-focused studies of passion-vine butterflies to broad theories about how to assess and conserve biodiversity as the natural world shrinks.

And they are just getting started.

If you have seen "Bug Attack" or "Bug Attack II," then you might recognize DeVries, who served as a scientific adviser and presenter on those National Geographic films, and a host of other ones. "My colleagues say their kids like me," DeVries says, laughing.

But DeVries' considers his work as a TV persona as a way to bring natural history into the public eye-an extension of his real job: intense, long-term studies of butterflies and their interplay with the creatures around them. His research on the symbioses between butterfly caterpillars, ants, and plants, for example, uncovered the fact that some caterpillars communicate acoustically with ants by rubbing two ringed rods against a jagged surface on their heads-the insect equivalent of a washboard.

Good vibrations are the start of a beautiful partnership. Drawn by the sound, the ants trek to the caterpillars, which reward them with food in the form of nutrient-rich secretions. In return, the ants protect the otherwise defenseless caterpillars from wasps and other insect predators.

Another DeVries study, at a field station in Ecuador, has been monitoring fruit-feeding butterflies on a monthly basis for nearly a decade-an unparalleled level of comprehensiveness that has produced reams of data on how an insect community functions. DeVries, in turn, has used that data to draw broader conclusions about broader issues, such as how to best assess and preserve tropical species diversity and habitat conservation.

So while his work with butterflies is groundbreaking-his two field guides to Costa Rican butterflies are often used as textbooks in university classrooms, and he has earned high-profile grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, among others-he uses the insects largely as vehicles to address bigger issues.

"Butterflies are taxis that I take to get to other places," he says.

One scientist's taxi is another's destination, and Carla Penz has kept her scientific sights set on the whos, whats and whys of butterflies for more than 15 years. "I'm more butterfly-focused than Phil," Penz says. "He works on questions that are more general."

In the UNO lab space that Penz will eventually share with DeVries when renovations are completed-their busy travel schedules mean that most of their equipment is still in boxes-she shows a visitor cases full of butterflies, then brings them to life via vivid descriptions of their secret lives, including a tale of the mating rites of the genus Actinote that is too bawdy and harrowing to recount here.

Penz, who left a position as Head of Invertebrate Zoology at the Milwaukee Public Museum to take the position at UNO, has a million butterfly tales to tell. She has published extensively on the natural history and evolutionary history of butterflies. She has won grants from the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, served as editor of the Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society , and given the plenary address at the most recent International Butterfly Symposium.

Her new research on Amathusiinae , a butterfly subfamily, will take her to Southeast Asia, where she will collaborate with DeVries and a colleague from Brazil to firm up a link between these butterflies and others that occur thousands of miles away in South America.

Collaborative work like this is a hallmark of Penz's research and, in DeVries, she has a rather accessible colleague. Research partners since 1996 and married since 1997, the two have co-authored nine journal
articles together, and collaborated on several National Science Foundation grants. They talk about biology at breakfast, on the way to work, at work, over dinner. All the time.

Such a close working relationship isn't always easy, Penz admits. Questions about who is steering a particular project are bound to arise. But the two share a similar mindset that might help explain how they have made it work so well. Interviewed independently, they both eventually came around to talking about how they love science because, simply put, it is so difficult.