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Dr Blanca Huertas: Revealing the collection’s secrets, one butterfly at a time
As Principal Curator of Lepidoptera, Dr Blanca Huertas is responsible for a huge collection of specimens. Not only that – Blanca’s also a researcher, author, student supervisor and regularly asked to comment on the state of our world according to butterflies.
This month she’s attending the global biodiversity conference, COP16, in Colombia. We sat down with Blanca to talk about her life, career and the power of perspectives.
“I’m a taxonomist – I like to name nature,” explains Dr Blanca Huertas.
“There are still a lot of butterflies lying there without names, all unorganised. I always have taxonomy in my head – I love finding new species in the collections.”
As a curator, no one day is like another, but taxonomy is a big part of Blanca’s work. In a nutshell, that’s naming, describing, and categorising the natural world.
One example that means a lot to her, she explains, is the Colombian species Magneuptychia pax. This mostly brown butterfly spent around 100 years without a name, until Blanca and her colleagues gave it one in 2016. It’s since been reassigned to a different genus, now known as Omacha pax.
The name ‘pax’ means peace. This was given in dedication to those affected by Colombia’s 50-year-long civil war and the peace process. The newly named butterfly was proudly on display at the Natural History Museum during the first state visit to the UK by Colombia’s then-President Santos, in November 2016. This wasn’t long after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to end the conflict.
The Colombian conflict began in the 1960s and has had a profound effect on the country’s environment – including the remote forests in which Omacha pax lives – and its people, including Blanca. Naming a butterfly for the peace process meant a lot to her.
“That was a great way to highlight and recognise that there are people suffering – not just the butterflies, but the people who live near the forests suffered a lot,” she says.
As the scientists state in their paper describing Magneuptychia pax, the species “is dedicated to the peace process in Colombia and to every person affected there by a conflict that has lasted more than five decades, including in the remote forests that this butterfly inhabits”.
Where it all began
Blanca grew up in Colombia, which is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world.
She’s been a nature enthusiast since she was very little, drawn in by flowers, plants and insects. Back then, however, butterflies – the insects she’d eventually become an expert on – weren’t as easy to find as you’d expect.
“In Europe there are lots of parks with lots of flowers. But in my country, it’s a little different,” Blanca explains. “The forests are out from the cities. You don’t see huge gatherings of butterflies – you have to get out of the city. So, you have to grow into that a little bit.”
Armed with a love of nature and the encouragement of family and mentors at university, Blanca followed a path into the sciences and a career dedicated to butterflies – although she admits she does still have a secret love for beetles.
Blanca’s journey at the Natural History Museum began in 2001 as a volunteer. She’s since climbed the ladder to Curator, Senior Curator and as of 2023, Principal Curator of Lepidoptera – that’s butterflies and moths, to you and me. It’s a big responsibility – Blanca’s in charge of an incredible 5.2 million insect specimens!
This small butterfly Blanca's holding here during fieldwork in Peru belongs to the genus Saurona. She was involved in naming this group after Sauron, the villain from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series. Image courtesy of Dr Blanca Huertas.
Championing Colombian butterflies
If you’ve ever thought a curator is just someone that keeps boxes of specimens neat and tidy, Blanca is proof positive that there’s so much more to the job than that. Her love for the butterflies of her home country led her to take on a monumental project that gives us a perfect example.
Colombia is home to a lot of butterflies, but no one knew exactly how many species live there. To solve this tantalising mystery, Blanca teamed up with Colombian colleagues. Together they checked through innumerable museum specimens, databases, fieldwork notes, books and articles, ultimately reaching a grand total of 3,642 species and 2,085 subspecies.
“Basically, every person who studied butterflies in Colombia wanted to do it,” Blanca explains. “I reconnected with colleagues in Colombia and we put every effort together and managed to publish this mammoth ‘Yellow Pages’ of the butterflies of Colombia.”
“There was always this question of what’s the country with the most butterflies in the world. Officially, we’re number one!”
Around 200 species on that checklist are endemic, meaning they’re only found in Colombia and nowhere else in the world. With these, Blanca made yet another pioneering move. Working with the support of the UK and Colombian governments, she and a team of likeminded scientists produced an identification guide for these endemic butterflies.
“I could have done a nice paper, but I thought, only a few will have access and read that. So, we made a bilingual book, so people who speak Spanish – a local scientist, a farmer or a schoolteacher – and people from abroad can read it.”
Making it more accessible still is that it’s free to download. The numbers speak for themselves – Endemic Butterflies of Colombia has been downloaded 20,000 times!
The book is filled to the brim with pictures of specimens that Blanca looks after. These show the front and back of the wings of each butterfly, as well as any differences between the male and female of a species. For each, there’s also information about their size, where they live and how to identify them.
It’s an immense piece of work. With many butterflies facing an uncertain future, hopefully it will encourage people to keep an eye out for Colombia’s precious endemic species.
You’ll find this small, yellow butterfly among the pages of Endemic Butterflies of Colombia. Found in the late 1800s in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria mountain range, this was the first specimen of Catasticta lycurgus ever collected. It took nearly 100 years to find its larger, less intensely yellow female counterpart.
A silent butterfly crisis
If you feel you’re spotting fewer and fewer butterflies with each passing year, you’re not alone. In fact, in September 2024 conservationists declared a butterfly emergency in response to how few of the insects people reported during the annual Big Butterfly Count.
The vast historic collection of butterflies at the Natural History Museum can tell us a lot about what exists, but its value also lies in showing us what has been lost.
Blanca mentions that colleagues in the field sometimes relay how rare a butterfly is in a particular place. But when she has then looked in the collection, she has found plenty of specimens of it from that location, indicating it was once much more common.
“There is a silent crisis of butterflies across the globe,” she says. “Being a butterfly person for decades, I can tell you there’s a lot of declines, a lot of extinctions.”
“We did this paper where we estimate half of the butterflies in Singapore are lost already,” she notes as an example.
There’s a lot driving butterfly declines, but Blanca singles out two big factors. The first is habitat loss, such as through people overly manicuring gardens and cutting down forests. The other is climate change, with warming areas becoming inhospitable for the species that live there.
But tracking these declines is tricky. Blanca highlights that we still don’t have a comprehensive, global-level list of all the butterflies that are really struggling. This isn’t an oversight, it’s just a very big task – the planet is home so some 20,000 species of butterfly.
Our Lepidoptera curators are in charge of around 12.5 million pinned specimens. Blanca is responsible for 5.2 million of these.
It’s often the case that butterflies in the more critical, hyperdiverse parts of the world – such as the Amazon – are poorly monitored compared to places such as Europe. Add to that the fact that while we may know what an adult butterfly looks like, we often know much less about their immature caterpillar stages and the plants they need. Without those basics, you can’t really proceed with conservation or reintroduction programmes.
“We need more analyses to see what is being lost or the way it’s being lost,” Blanca explains. “We have the resources, we’ve got the experts, we’ve got lots of technology – it shouldn’t be that difficult. It just needs investment.”
“We rescue the pandas and the whales because we know about that. But if we don’t know about butterflies, we can’t do anything.”
Guardians of the collection
When asked about her proudest achievement to date, it might shock Lord of the Rings fans but naming a group of butterflies after the villainous Sauron isn’t number one on Blanca’s list.
“If you asked me that question 10 years ago or pre-COVID, I would’ve said I’ve got amazing papers, I’ve described quite a few species and I’ve published quite a few books – the kind of achievement that, obviously, scientists are proud of.”
“But to be honest, over the last few years, it’s becoming an advocate of collections, because they have been underused by researchers. People think it’s just old stuff we can leave in a museum, but it’s not!”
One of the important advantages of museum collections, Blanca notes, is that they can transport you anywhere in the world. This includes places you can’t physically go to, whether because of bureaucracy, safety or geography.
“We use the collections now for really cool stuff – for genomics, for public engagement, for art, for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so on,” she explains.
But it isn’t just working on the collections that makes Blanca proud. She also mentions that, as a minority and a woman, she’s proud to mentor, motivate and advocate for people who have less privilege in science.
In fact, she was one of the founders of our IDEA group – an internal collective set up at the Natural History Museum to champion equity, diversity and inclusion across our workforce and activities – and spent two years as its co-lead.
As Blanca explains, there’s huge value in bringing diverse voices and points of view into science.
“We are guardians of an international collection,” Blanca says. "The collection has been assembled over 150 years from every place in the world. We have a duty to facilitate access and to talk about that collection with relevance. If we are single-minded or people who have only worked on one area, all of the other knowledge is lost from the collection.”
“It’s good to have people who have lived experience. I spend a lot of time in the field, for example in the mountains, so I bring all of that expertise, experience and knowledge on the biogeography of South America. Since I arrived, I have dug out knowledge on the things I know.”
While Blanca does a lot of her research in the collections, she’s no stranger to fieldwork. In 2016, she spent time searching for butterflies in the high mountains of Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park, for example.
“I would love to have more people from Asia, from Africa, to come and contribute, because we have huge collections from those areas of the world. If I have colleagues from the LGBT community, or people with disabilities, they understand the collections in another way.”
“It’s a good investment to bring in different people, because we’re always going to be fresh, have new ideas and move on.”
Looking ahead to COP16 and beyond
Between caring for one of the world’s most important butterfly collections, describing new species and championing diversity in science, you’d think Blanca already has enough on her plate.
But she’s not slowing down. Put it this way, Blanca describes the next few years as “crazy”. For a start, she’s working on a new book on the butterflies of the world, which will be published sometime in 2025.
Meanwhile, she’s diving into the collection for some huge genomics projects, studying DNA to better understand the evolutionary relationships among butterflies and to describe even more new species.
“We’re teaming up with the genomics, digitisation and the collections teams, with local universities and with international colleagues,” Blanca explains, stressing just how important collaboration is in the world of science and collections. “We’re probably going to describe hundreds of species with this project!”
“We’re also trying to modernise the collections at a fast pace because of the big digitisation project. We’re trying to keep up so when they want to digitise the butterflies we are organised and in a good state – we can’t digitise some of them as they are because they’re still arranged in the 1900s style, and that doesn’t work.”
The Digital Collections Programme has been running since 2014, with the aim of digitising all 80 million items in the collections we care for. Blanca is working her way through the butterfly collection making sure it’s ready to be digitised. This involves updating the layout of the collection and a lot of labels.
But perhaps the biggest upcoming item on Blanca’s agenda is COP16 in October. This is the annual United Nations Biodiversity Conference that brings together governments, scientists and policy makers to try and figure out ways to protect and preserve the natural world.
This year it’s being held in the city of Cali in southwest Colombia, giving it extra meaning to Blanca, who’s attending along with a few Natural History Museum colleagues.
“It’s going to be great being able to go and talk to governments,” enthuses Blanca. “We’re having conversations on huge international collaborations to make projects happen and much easier. Obviously, we need to work in synergy with the countries where biodiversity is.”
Living through the climate and biodiversity crises is tough. It can be particularly confronting for those living on the front lines as extreme weather increases, but also scientists and conservationists seeing the changes every day through their work.
Blanca advises that an important factor in helping us all move forward is to think positive. “Of course, we still have to publish things to say this is or is going to be extinct, just to shake people. But after that we should be focusing more on the positive.”
“What can you actually do to prevent loss or recover the few things we still have? We know there is a planetary emergency now – what can you do, what can we do, what can people do?”
“If we don’t create conscious people, the declines and biodiversity loss are going to increase – but if people care, it’s preventable.”
