Henry Bates is played by Calum Finlay in a film about the British 19th-century adventurer in the Amazon. (Courtesy of SK Films )
Any 23-year-old British guy living in the Amazon rain forest would have butterflies in his stomach. But Henry Bates — who made a trip there in 1848 — also had butterflies on his mind. Why did some different species look almost exactly alike?
The answer is now available in 3-D. “Amazon Adventure,” a 45-minute film that premieres April 18 at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and will then be shown at theaters across the country, invites viewers to tag along with Bates as he journeys into the wild, collecting samples of creatures never catalogued before. Along the way, he discovers a phenomenon later named for him: Batesian mimicry, in which, for example, harmless butterflies developed wing markings that resembled those of poisonous butterflies, making them seem yucky to hungry birds.
Fittingly, the science lessons here are disguised by a compelling plot, all rooted in the story of Bates’s life. The son of sockmakers, he resisted going into the family business. Instead, he and a friend made their way to Brazil, where he spent 11 years dodging all kinds of dangers while conducting research. (The pal — Alfred Wallace — returned after four years, just barely making it back alive.)
For very young viewers, the scariest stuff probably won’t be the various shipwrecks and bouts of malaria, but the close-ups of creepy-crawlies. At one point, Bates comes face-to-face with what he thinks is a poisonous snake. But it turns out to be just a large caterpillar trying to ward off predators. As the actor playing Bates explains, “In the game of life, tricksters have a better chance to survive.”
Most of the animal images are more likely to inspire wonder — or giggles. Upon witnessing a tiny white blob saunter across a leaf, Bates marvels that there are “bird droppings that walk.” Now, that’s something to see in 3-D. More details are available at amazonadventurefilm.com.
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[This tree lures birds with a free lunch and then kills them]
[With no males, these butterflies are evolving into a separate species]
[These creatures faced extinction. The Endangered Species Act saved them.]