Beyond just adoring animals, one should do one’s best with expertise and a grave sense of responsibility for life.” It is not wrong, but what zookeepers do can directly affect the lives of animals.

Kim said, “Many people think that if they love animals, they can be a zookeeper. Kim’s achievements are based on his tendency to adopt the perspective of “What if I was an insect?” He explained, “Asking this kind of question makes me realize that I am accustomed to thinking from a human point of view and see things in a new light.” After becoming a zookeeper, he also redefined what he thinks love is. Kim explained, “It was a common belief that breeding them in a dark place during the daytime is good so that they can give out bright light, but the experiment revealed that they emit stronger light when it gets dark when they are sufficiently exposed to bright places.” This discovery was applied to the park’s firefly exhibition. Cabbage butterflies were considered to like red shades, but unlike the expectations the experiment showed a preference for purple.” Based on this result, Kim helped extend the life of cabbage butterflies by changing the color of the flowers. Kim said, “We usually only fed nectar with one color of artificial flowers, but I was wondering if this was correct, so I put transparent containers on various colored papers and recorded the number of times butterflies ate nectar per variety. To do this, they used artificial flowers of a color known to be liked by butterflies, to feed them nectar, and Kim was curious about this.

Butterflies can easily die if they do not eat for a just day or two, so it is important to feed them well. One successful achievement is to find out the preferred colors of each butterfly variety. In order to make up for insufficient materials and data out there needed for insect breeding, he also conducts his own research and experiments and accumulates new expertise.

Keeper by Kim Chance