3 cool facts about the Natural History Museum's new Butterfly Pavilion

The butterflies of the Natural History Museum have a new space to call home.

This weekend, the museum debuts its shiny new Butterfly Pavilion — filled with 400 to 500 butterflies from 25 different species.

"Normally, when you encounter butterflies in the wild, you see them for a second or two. They move so quickly. But in a butterfly exhibition, you can spend as much time as you want. It really gives you a way to put on your nature eyes," says Cat Urban, the manager of the museum's living invertebrate program.

Urban explains what's so special about the structure and its inhabitants.

1. Love is in the air

"There will be lots of courting going on in this captive space," Urban says. Look for butterflies ovipositing on their host plants and nectaring from their nectar plants. "The ones that are reproducing in the pavilion, the native ones, you'll get to see their whole life history — their eggs, their caterpillars, their pupae."

2. Design hacks can help butterflies

The dome-like structure housing the Butterfly Pavilion replaces an 18-year-old building, and its design was optimized to help butterflies. "Butterflies really need a rounded type of environment. They kind of get stuck in corners. They don't have a good reverse. So if they fly into a 90-degree corner, they get stuck in that spot," Urban says. Most of the negative space and corners that impact butterflies were designed out of the new 2,200-square-foot building.

3. This land is their land

All the butterflies in the pavilion — buckeyes, painted ladies, swallowtails, malachites, zebra longwings and more — are native to the United States. They come from around the country: California, Texas, Florida and the Eastern seaboard. "It's just different when you're walking among 500 butterflies from all over the United States," Urban says. "You're in there with 500, but you can barely hear them. You can just see them visually. It's an interesting, calming aesthetic experience."

The show runs for four weeks, through Oct. 16. After that, the butterflies will be replaced by another seasonal exhibition, the Spider Pavilion.