Cindy Smith, age 9, of Brunswick, Georgia, for her question:

What do they mean by butterfly nymphs?

A leaf may grow on a tree or belong in a book. Lots of words do double duty. Some change through the years. A nymph was once a word for a young bride. Nowadays it is used to n4me two very different creatures in the world of insects. One kind of nymph is a pretty brown butterfly.

In ancient days, people could not believe that the beautiful woods and forests grew all by themselves without anyone to help them. So they invented pretty girls and called them nymphs. These fairy creatures were supposed to dwell happily among the greenery and tend the growing trees. Once in a while, someone caught a glimpse of a nymph peeping through the foliage or at least he said he did. Chances are it was either a real human girl or one he imagined because these fairy type tree tending nymphs never really existed.

But nymph is a pretty word, and nobody wanted to lose it, even when believing in fairies went out of style. So people found something real to give it to. They gave it to certain butterflies that flit around like fairy creatures through the open woods and up the mountain slopes. These nymph butterflies have wings of leafy browns. The dainty creatures are marked with dots that seem to wink and blink as they flutter through the greenery. The common wood nymph that lives almost everywhere is a dark plum toned brown. On each front wing she has two bright yellow eye spots with dark centers.

There are about 60 slightly different cousins in this butterfly family. With wings outspread, most of them are about two inches wide or a little less. Like all butterflies, the nymphs go through four stages of life. They begin as eggs and hatch into hungry caterpillars. Then they go through a sleeping chrysalis stage and finally hatch into grown up insects with butterfly wings. The nymph caterpillars gorge themselves on grasses and sedges. They are smallish fellows with forked tails and most of them are greenish brown. Some types have a small red horn at each end.

These butterflies, however, are not the only nymphs in the insect world. Not all insects go through four stages of life. Many types hatch from eggs into miniature copies of their parents. These wingless youngsters are called nymphs. A baby nymph eats her favorite food, grows bigger, and bursts her skin but this does not matter at all a new and bigger skin already has grown underneath to replace the old one. Insects that go through this nymph stage molt their old skins four, five, or even six times. The last molt is the important one. When the old skin cracks apart, out struggles a fully grown insect with wings all ready to fly. The family of nymph butterflies, however, go through a caterpillar stage instead of a nymph stage of life.

Earwigs and dragonflies go through a nymph stage of life. So do crickets and katydids, locusts and roaches. Mrs. Red Legged Grasshopper lays her white eggs neatly in the ground. Each one that hatches looks like a small, comic strip copy of Momma. He has a chunky, full sized head, a short stubby body, and oversized pair of red jumping legs, but no wings. This little insect nymph will molt four times, each time getting bigger. After the fifth molt he will come forth as a grownup cricket with full sized wings.