NC Museum of Natural Sciences reopens Butterfly Room on Memorial Day weekend after long pandemic closure

The popular Butterfly Exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is re-opening for Memorial Day weekend. That comes after closing the popular room for a few years due to the pandemic.

New visitors will find that the display is far more than just butterflies. Walking into the room is like a trip into a steamy jungle.

Curator, Andy Kauffman said, "It’s modeled after a tropical dry forest." He says they have about 30 different species of butterflies. "So at any given time, there’s probably 200 butterflies in her. // The kids especially get a kick out of getting close to a butterfly or a butterfly possibly landing on them."

The butterflies don’t have the whole room to themselves. They flutter without fear among two wood turtles and even a "sloth".

The tree sloth gets regular meals delivered to his tree. "So I’ve got some food ready and I think he’ll come down for us," said Kauffman.

The sloth moves slowly but surely toward his daily buffet with a bowl which Kauffman balanced carefully on a limb. "This is romaine, squash, zucchini, apples, oranges, carrots and some kind of primate biscuit and a canned diet," said Kauffman.

Most creatures prefer keeping right-side up, but not sloths. "Sloths, you know, spend a lot of their time upside down. He’s just designed to be in his tree-lifestyle, this arboreal life," explained Kauffman.

Another neighbor is a tarantula, safely kept in an enclosed glass chamber. The furry spider had already grown out of his old home, which was his own shell. "This is a ‘molt’ from a tarantula," said Kauffman, holding the remains of the old body.

He added, "So this animal is still alive but it molted its exoskeleton to grow." The old body reveals his old set of eyes and even his fangs.

Another critter, may look like a dangerous snake. It has the colorful banding similar to a Scarlet King Snake. "We do have a scarlet king snake native to North Carolina, looks similar to this animal, but they are mimicking a coral snake; they mimic a venomous snake so they are not venomous."

On average, the butterflies only live about two weeks. The museum gets a regular shipment of them before they emerge from their "chrysalis" with new wings.