| rev:text
| - Butterfly Wonderland just opened up May 25th, and there were a lot of families and couples lined up to experience America's newest and largest butterfly conservatory.
Admission is about $19 for each adult, with senior and student discounts. When you enter, you have the choice of seeing the 3D movie or moving onward to the next room. The movie is around 15 minutes, and shows off the 3D views and pretty imagery rather than a lot of informative discussion about the monarch butterfly.
After the movie, you enter a room that showcases the different pupae that are in the process of transforming into a butterfly. Since there was a large crowd when we went, there was a little bit of a wait for patrons in the actual conservatory to exit before more could enter.
The actual conservatory is a photography student's dream. The landscape is a bit ethereal as various butterflies flutter by you. Some may even land on you for a quick second before taking off again. Although we did have a guide to the different species of butterflies in our brochure, there wasn't much else in terms of education about the different butterflies.
The next section after the conservatory shows a honeybee colony and several ant colonies. The ant colonies in agar were lighted up with neon, making it look like the ants were having a rave. It was cool to see the honeybees, with the queen marked with a green dot to differentiate her from the other bees.
There is also a set of nice aquariums, and a touch pool with stingrays. The aquarium was a weird addition to a butterfly conservatory I thought. The fish were all freshwater common species you could find at your nearest Petsmart (e.g., African cichlids, various gourami, neon tetras). There were a few signs listing the species, but not all the aquariums were labeled. Like the butterfly section, the stingray and fish section didn't have a lot of educational information in them.
It took us about an hour to browse through everything. The experience here is nice, but it's more of a visual experience rather than a learning one. Some things that might be good for the exhibits are more information about butterfly conservation, why the different species of butterflies are differently colored, and how different cultures view butterflies. Since there are so many children that visit the conservatory, it would be nice for them to be enticed to learn about nature in addition to the visual interactive beauty of the butterflies.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)