Massachusetts Butterfly Club

The Spring meeting of the Massachusetts Butterfly Club was held on Saturday, April 10th. Sixty-two enthusiasts attended via Zoom.

Our guest speaker was Phil Torres, entomologist, science communicator, and television host, who presented "Bizzare Butterflies: A Virtual Journey Into The Rainforest To Understand Their Fascinating, Under-appreciated Oddities".

Phil grew up in Colorado with a passion for butterflies. From the age of seven he knew they were fascinating, exciting, and worthy of a lifetime of appreciation and study. But soon, he discovered

something else about butterflies: they are very, very weird. After years of working as a biologist and science storyteller in the tropics around the world, Phil will give us a tour of a muddy, humid jungle from the perspective of a butterfly. How they eat, how they mate, how they sleep and even what they smell like prepare to get to know butterflies and their strangest of ways.

Phil Torres is an entomologist, science communicator, and television host whose career all began with dreams of adventures with butterflies around the world. With an entomology degree from Cornell University and two years of living in the Amazon Rainforest, his career in research turned into a career in outreach, photography, documentaries and eventually, television. From being an international science journalist reporting from places like the Arctic and 11,000 feet below (in a submarine), he now hosts The Jungle Diaries on YouTube and Expedition X on the Discovery Channel. His love of nature, butterflies, and conservation has landed him in commercials with brands like Intel and Tommy Hilfiger and his research has been featured everywhere from BBC to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Phil also guides science adventure trips to the Amazon, Galapagos, and the monarch migration site in Mexico. Learn more about him at https://www.phil-torres.com.

To watch his presentation on YouTube
https://youtu.be/54-INDy7Xcw

The presentation was followed by a "social hour" on Zoom which was a fun time with many participating.

Thanks to technical experts Dave Small and Rosemary Mosco for making the meeting run so smoothly.