VirusPetit Pois
Catsup
Prov. 26:12
"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him."
Praying Mantis
Chess: "virus" "on the road" "ciclon" "petit pois" "candelillas"
Published: June 29, 2009
MATING In many fireflies, pairs stay coupled for hours while the male, lower, gives the female a protein package injected with sperm, called a nuptial gift.
LINCOLN, Mass. — Sara Lewis is fluent in firefly. On this night she walks through a farm field in eastern Massachusetts, watching the first fireflies of the evening rise into the air and begin to blink on and off. Dr. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University, points out six species in this meadow, each with its own pattern of flashes.
Along one edge of the meadow are Photinus greeni, with double pulses separated by three seconds of darkness. Near a stream are Photinus ignitus, with a five-second delay between single pulses. And near a forest are Pyractomena angulata, which make Dr. Lewis’s favorite flash pattern. “It’s like a flickering orange rain,” she said.
The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females are sitting and observing. They look for flash patterns of males of their own species, and sometimes they respond with a single flash of their own, always at a precise interval after the male’s. Dr. Lewis takes out a penlight and clicks it twice, in perfect Photinus greeni. A female Photinus greeni flashes back.
“Most people don’t realize there’s this call and response going on,” Dr. Lewis said. “But it’s very, very easy to talk to fireflies.”
For Dr. Lewis, this meadow is the stage for an invertebrate melodrama, full of passion and yearning, of courtship duets and competitions for affection, of cruel deception and gruesome death. For the past 16 years, Dr. Lewis has been coming to this field to decipher the evolutionary forces at play in this production, as fireflies have struggled to survive and spread their genes to the next generation.
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
“Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies,” Dr. Lewis said. She eventually started to explore the yard, inspecting the males and females. “What really struck me was that in this one-acre area there were hundreds of males and I could only find two or three females,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, this is so intense.’ ”
When a lot of males are competing for the chance to mate with females, a species experiences a special kind of evolution. If males have certain traits that make them attractive to females, they will mate more than other males. And that preference may mean that those attractive males can pass down their traits to the next generation. Over thousands of generations, the entire species may be transformed.
Charles Darwin described this process, which he called sexual selection, in 1871, using male displays of antlers and feathers as examples. He did not mention fireflies. In fact, fireflies remained fairly mysterious for another century. It was not until the 1960s that James Lloyd, a University of Florida biologist, deciphered the call and response of several species of North American firefly.
Dr. Lewis, realizing that other firefly mysteries remained to be solved, switched to fireflies from fish in 1984, when she became a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. She taught herself Dr. Lloyd’s firefly code and then began to investigate firefly mating habits. North American fireflies spend two years underground as larvae, then spend the final two weeks of their lives as adults, flashing, mating and laying eggs. When Dr. Lewis started studying fireflies, scientists could not say whether the females mated once and then laid all their eggs, or mated with many males. “Nobody knew what happened after the lights went out,” Dr. Lewis said.
She searched for mating fireflies in the evening, marked their locations with surveyor’s flags and then revisited them every half-hour through the night. They were still mating at dawn.
“It was cool to watch the sun rise and see the couples breaking up and the females crawling down the grass to lay their eggs,” Dr. Lewis said.
Many Americans are familiar with the kinds of fireflies Dr. Lewis studies, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the 2,000 species worldwide. And there is enormous variation in these insects. “There are some species that produce flashes when they’re adults, and there are some that simply glow as adults,” Dr. Lewis said. “Then there are a whole bunch of species where the adults don’t produce any light at all.”
In recent years scientists have analyzed the DNA of fireflies to figure out how their light has evolved. The common ancestor of today’s fireflies probably produced light only when they were larvae. All firefly larvae still glow today, as a warning to would-be predators. The larvae produce bitter chemicals that make them an unpleasant meal.
As adults, the earliest fireflies probably communicated with chemical signals, the way some firefly species do today. Only much later did some firefly species gain through evolution the ability to make light as adults. Instead of a warning, the light became a mating call. (An enzyme in the firefly’s tail drives a chemical reaction that makes light.)
The more Dr. Lewis watched firefly courtship, the clearer it became that the females were carefully choosing mates. They start dialogues with up to 10 males in a single evening and can keep several conversations going at once. But a female mates with only one male, typically the one she has responded to the most.
Dr. Lewis wondered if the female fireflies were picking their mates based on variations in the flashes of the males. To test that possibility, she took female fireflies to her lab, where she has computer-controlled light systems that can mimic firefly flashes. “You can play back specific signals to females and see what they respond to,” Dr. Lewis said.
The female fireflies turned out to be remarkably picky. In many cases, a male flash got no response at all. In some species, females preferred faster pulse rates. In others, the females preferred males that made long-lasting pulses.
If females preferred some flashes over others, Dr. Lewis wondered why those preferences had evolved in the first place. One possible explanation was that the signals gave female fireflies a valuable clue about the males. Somehow, mating with males with certain flash patterns allowed females to produce more offspring, which would inherit their preference.
It is possible that females use flashes to figure out which males can offer the best gifts. In many invertebrate species, the males provide females with food to help nourish their eggs. Dr. Lewis and her colleagues discovered that fireflies also made these so-called nuptial gifts — packages of protein they inject with their sperm.
Dr. Lewis is not sure why she and her colleagues were the first to find them. The gifts form coils that can take up a lot of space in a male firefly’s abdomen. “They’re incredibly beautiful,” she said.
Receiving nuptial gifts, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues have shown, can make a huge difference in the reproductive success of a female firefly. “It just about doubles the number of eggs a female can lay in her lifetime,” she said. One reason the effect is so big is that fireflies do not eat during their two-week adulthood. A slowly starving female can use a nuptial gift to build more eggs.
In at least some species, females may use flashes to pick out males with the biggest gifts. Dr. Lewis has tested this hypothesis in two species; in one, males with conspicuous flashes have bigger gifts. In another species, she found no link.
“In some cases they could be honest signals, and in some cases they could be deceptive signals,” Dr. Lewis said.
Deception may, in fact, evolve very easily among fireflies. It turns out that a male firefly does not need to burn many extra calories to make flashes. “It takes some energy, but it’s tiny. It’s less costly for a male than flying around,” Dr. Lewis said.
If making light is so cheap for males, it seems odd that they have not all evolved to be more attractive to females. “What is it that keeps their flashes from getting longer and longer or faster and faster?” Dr. Lewis asked.
Scanning the meadow, she grabbed her insect net and ran after a fast-flying firefly with a triple flash. She caught an animal that may offer the answer to her question. Dr. Lewis dropped the insect into a tube and switched on a headlamp to show her catch. Called Photuris, it is a firefly that eats other fireflies.
“They are really nasty predators,” Dr. Lewis said. Photuris fireflies sometimes stage aerial assaults, picking out other species by their flashes and swooping down to attack. In other cases, they sit on a blade of grass, responding to male fireflies with deceptive flashes. When the males approach, Photuris grabs them.
“They pounce, they bite, they suck blood — all the gory stuff,” Dr. Lewis said. She has found that each Photuris can eat several fireflies in a night. Photuris kills other fireflies only to retrieve bad-tasting chemicals from their bodies, which it uses to protect itself from predators.
To study how Photuris predation affects its firefly prey, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues built sticky traps equipped with lights that mimicked courtship signals of Photuris’s victims. The scientists found that Photuris was more likely to attack when flash rates were faster. In other words, conspicuous flashes — the ones females prefer — also make males more likely to be killed.
“At least where Photuris predators are around,” Dr. Lewis said, “there’s going to be a strong selection for less conspicuous flashes.”
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, also known as Corpse Bride, is a 2005 stop-motion-animation fantasy film directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton. It is based loosely on a 19th century Russian-Jewish folktale version of an older Jewish story and set in a fictional Victorian era village in Britain. Johnny Depp led an all-star cast as the voice of Victor and Helena Bonham Carter (for whom the project was specially created) voiced Emily, the title character.
The movie exhibits Burton's trademark style and recurring themes (the complex interaction between light and darkness, and of being caught between two irreconcilable worlds). Life is portrayed as boring and dully gray tinted while death is more fun, as evidenced by the brighter colors and jaunty music. The movie can be particularly compared to The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton's previous stop-motion feature project and Beetlejuice, especially in the scenes depicting the underworld and its deceased denizens.
The film was nominated in the 78th Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. It lost to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
The story is set in a cold, gloomy Victorian era town in Britain. A shy young man by the name of Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), son of nouveau riche fishmongers Nell (Tracey Ullman) and William Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse), is due to be wed to beautiful young Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), daughter of corrupt, bankrupt hereditary aristocrats Maudeline, Lady Everglot (Joanna Lumley), and Finis, Lord Everglot (Albert Finney). The arranged marriage will elevate the Van Dorts to a higher level in society, while saving the Everglots from the poor house. Victor isn't too keen on the idea of an arranged marriage with a woman he's never met before until he meets the charming Victoria face-to-face. The two hit it off from the start despite their earlier misgivings. But after ruining the wedding rehearsal (and accidentally setting Victoria's mother's skirt on fire in the process), Victor is banished by Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee) until he can learn his wedding vows properly.
Victor wanders through the forest practicing his vows, consistently blundering them. At long last he gains confidence and successfully recites them, and upon spying a tree root that resembles a human hand, places his bride's wedding ring on it. No sooner has he done so, he realizes it really is a human hand as it comes to life and grabs him by the arm. Emerging from the frozen earth is the "Corpse Bride" Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a beautiful undead girl in a moldy, flowing wedding dress, and she declares Victor her husband.
Victor awakens after a black-out in a pub with the dead. He learns that he is in the Land of the Dead, and is told by a musical performing skeleton named Bonejangles (Danny Elfman) how Emily was jilted, murdered and robbed during her intended elopement, and has been waiting for her true love to come and claim her ever since. He flees the building, but Emily finds Victor and attempts to bond with him, giving him a wedding present of the live skeleton of his beloved and long-deceased puppy, Scraps. Dearly wishing to return to Victoria, Victor convinces the Bride and the old Elder Gutknecht (Michael Gough) to return them both temporarily to the Land of the Living via the Ukrainian Haunting Spell (the only way to return to the Land of the Dead is if either says "hopscotch") under the pretense of introducing her to his parents. Once they arrive, Victor tells Emily to stay put in the woods until he returns, and secretly reunites with Victoria. There he confesses his love for her, to which Victoria responds, relieved, that she feels the same about him. As they prepare to kiss, they are discovered by Emily; realizing the deception, Emily angrily spirits Victor back to the Land of the Dead before a helpless and terrified Victoria's eyes.
Emily feels betrayed and heartbroken by Victor's deception, and tells him so. Victor responds by saying that Victoria wasn't the "other woman" but that Emily was. He adds that they were just too different by saying that he was living and she was dead. After becoming thoroughly frustrated with Emily, he tells her that their marriage was a mistake and that he would "never marry her". Crestfallen, Emily leaves. Victor immediately regrets his words, but leaves Emily alone for the time being. Emily is horribly heartbroken, but begins to concede that maybe he and Victoria are meant for each other because they are both alive while Emily is not. Victoria, meanwhile tries to convince the pastor and her parents that Victor is in danger, but they express disbelief to her claims of a "corpse bride". Maudeline and Finis lock her in her room and plan a match with the presumably rich Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant) instead. Victoria, completely absorbed and troubled by Victor's disappearance, tries to argue with her parents by telling them she doesn't love Barkis, but fails terribly. Unknown to the others, Barkis intends to kill Victoria and make off with the fortune he believes she has.
Victor apologizes to Emily for his deception, and Emily's love for him is renewed as Victor sees that Emily is a kind girl, not a monster, and they begin to get along very well. Suddenly, an old acquaintance of Victor's dies and arrives in the Land of the Dead, delivering the news of Victoria's engagement, leaving Victor distraught and heartbroken. Emily, meanwhile, learns that her marriage to Victor is not official: the marriage vows bind the couple until "death do them part" and as Emily is already dead, the marriage won't apply to them until Victor is dead as well. The only way to validate their matrimony is if they return to the Land of the Living where they must re-recite their vows, after which Victor must kill himself by drinking the "Wine of Ages", an extremely potent poison. Emily does not believe Victor would ever want to bring such a grisly fate to himself, but Victor, thinking that Victoria has moved on with her life without him, decides to make the best of his situation (and bring happiness to Emily), and agrees to carry out the ceremony.
As Victoria is married to Barkis unwillingly, the residents of the Land of the Dead busy themselves preparing for a wedding of their own, rising up to the Land of the Living, storming the town and having a chaotic marriage "celebration" on their way to the church. In the ensuing chaos, the newly-wed Lord Barkis finally learns from Victoria that she is penniless. Meanwhile, there the villagers panic when their town is invaded by the dead, until both sides suddenly recognize their loved ones and are overjoyed by the temporary reunion.
Victoria heads for the church, and arrives as Victor is in the midst of the wedding ceremony that will culminate in his death. Emily spots the heartbroken Victoria, and realizes that Victor's death, while making her happy, will cheat Victoria out of a happy life herself. Emily calls off the ceremony just as Victor is about to drink the Wine of Ages, and gives him back to Victoria. The reunion is interrupted by Lord Barkis, who reminds the crowd that Victoria is still his wife, and starts to kidnap her at sword point. Emily is shocked and horrified as she recognizes Barkis as the man who not only jilted, but murdered and robbed her long ago. A sword fight ensues between Barkis and Victor (with Victor wielding a dinner fork tossed to him by a dead cook). Barkis corners Victor and is just about to jam his sword into Victor's stomach, when Emily rushes between them and blocks the blow with her chest, saving Victor's life while leaving herself completely unscathed.
A seething Emily orders Barkis to leave. The rest of the dead, outraged at what he did to Emily, try to stop him, but they are unable to interfere since he is of the living and therefore not under their power. But before leaving, he proposes a mock-toast to Emily and drinks the wine intended for Victor. As he turns to leave, he realizes too late that the wine is poisoned and dies within seconds. Now that he is one of them, the other dead are able to avenge Emily by dragging him through a side-door to make his afterlife a torment.
Emily begins to leave. When Victor stops her to fulfill his promise, she explains that he had already kept his promise by setting her free, and that now she shall do the same for him. She hands him Victoria's ring back, and continues to walk away. She pauses as she leaves the church to toss her bouquet to Victoria. As she reaches the threshold of the church, Emily finds peace herself and her body transforms into hundreds of butterflies. Victor and Victoria rush to the threshold and look on together at the sight. Victor then looks down at his soon to be bride lovingly and puts his arm around her as the butterflies flew higher into the moon.
Blink Twice if You Like Me
Published: June 29, 2009
MATING In many fireflies, pairs stay coupled for hours while the male, lower, gives the female a protein package injected with sperm, called a nuptial gift.LINCOLN, Mass. — Sara Lewis is fluent in firefly. On this night she walks through a farm field in eastern Massachusetts, watching the first fireflies of the evening rise into the air and begin to blink on and off. Dr. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University, points out six species in this meadow, each with its own pattern of flashes.
Along one edge of the meadow are Photinus greeni, with double pulses separated by three seconds of darkness. Near a stream are Photinus ignitus, with a five-second delay between single pulses. And near a forest are Pyractomena angulata, which make Dr. Lewis’s favorite flash pattern. “It’s like a flickering orange rain,” she said.
The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females are sitting and observing. They look for flash patterns of males of their own species, and sometimes they respond with a single flash of their own, always at a precise interval after the male’s. Dr. Lewis takes out a penlight and clicks it twice, in perfect Photinus greeni. A female Photinus greeni flashes back.
“Most people don’t realize there’s this call and response going on,” Dr. Lewis said. “But it’s very, very easy to talk to fireflies.”
For Dr. Lewis, this meadow is the stage for an invertebrate melodrama, full of passion and yearning, of courtship duets and competitions for affection, of cruel deception and gruesome death. For the past 16 years, Dr. Lewis has been coming to this field to decipher the evolutionary forces at play in this production, as fireflies have struggled to survive and spread their genes to the next generation.
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
“Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies,” Dr. Lewis said. She eventually started to explore the yard, inspecting the males and females. “What really struck me was that in this one-acre area there were hundreds of males and I could only find two or three females,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, this is so intense.’ ”
When a lot of males are competing for the chance to mate with females, a species experiences a special kind of evolution. If males have certain traits that make them attractive to females, they will mate more than other males. And that preference may mean that those attractive males can pass down their traits to the next generation. Over thousands of generations, the entire species may be transformed.
Charles Darwin described this process, which he called sexual selection, in 1871, using male displays of antlers and feathers as examples. He did not mention fireflies. In fact, fireflies remained fairly mysterious for another century. It was not until the 1960s that James Lloyd, a University of Florida biologist, deciphered the call and response of several species of North American firefly.
Dr. Lewis, realizing that other firefly mysteries remained to be solved, switched to fireflies from fish in 1984, when she became a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. She taught herself Dr. Lloyd’s firefly code and then began to investigate firefly mating habits. North American fireflies spend two years underground as larvae, then spend the final two weeks of their lives as adults, flashing, mating and laying eggs. When Dr. Lewis started studying fireflies, scientists could not say whether the females mated once and then laid all their eggs, or mated with many males. “Nobody knew what happened after the lights went out,” Dr. Lewis said.
She searched for mating fireflies in the evening, marked their locations with surveyor’s flags and then revisited them every half-hour through the night. They were still mating at dawn.
“It was cool to watch the sun rise and see the couples breaking up and the females crawling down the grass to lay their eggs,” Dr. Lewis said.
Many Americans are familiar with the kinds of fireflies Dr. Lewis studies, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the 2,000 species worldwide. And there is enormous variation in these insects. “There are some species that produce flashes when they’re adults, and there are some that simply glow as adults,” Dr. Lewis said. “Then there are a whole bunch of species where the adults don’t produce any light at all.”
In recent years scientists have analyzed the DNA of fireflies to figure out how their light has evolved. The common ancestor of today’s fireflies probably produced light only when they were larvae. All firefly larvae still glow today, as a warning to would-be predators. The larvae produce bitter chemicals that make them an unpleasant meal.
As adults, the earliest fireflies probably communicated with chemical signals, the way some firefly species do today. Only much later did some firefly species gain through evolution the ability to make light as adults. Instead of a warning, the light became a mating call. (An enzyme in the firefly’s tail drives a chemical reaction that makes light.)
The more Dr. Lewis watched firefly courtship, the clearer it became that the females were carefully choosing mates. They start dialogues with up to 10 males in a single evening and can keep several conversations going at once. But a female mates with only one male, typically the one she has responded to the most.
Dr. Lewis wondered if the female fireflies were picking their mates based on variations in the flashes of the males. To test that possibility, she took female fireflies to her lab, where she has computer-controlled light systems that can mimic firefly flashes. “You can play back specific signals to females and see what they respond to,” Dr. Lewis said.
The female fireflies turned out to be remarkably picky. In many cases, a male flash got no response at all. In some species, females preferred faster pulse rates. In others, the females preferred males that made long-lasting pulses.
If females preferred some flashes over others, Dr. Lewis wondered why those preferences had evolved in the first place. One possible explanation was that the signals gave female fireflies a valuable clue about the males. Somehow, mating with males with certain flash patterns allowed females to produce more offspring, which would inherit their preference.
It is possible that females use flashes to figure out which males can offer the best gifts. In many invertebrate species, the males provide females with food to help nourish their eggs. Dr. Lewis and her colleagues discovered that fireflies also made these so-called nuptial gifts — packages of protein they inject with their sperm.
Dr. Lewis is not sure why she and her colleagues were the first to find them. The gifts form coils that can take up a lot of space in a male firefly’s abdomen. “They’re incredibly beautiful,” she said.
Receiving nuptial gifts, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues have shown, can make a huge difference in the reproductive success of a female firefly. “It just about doubles the number of eggs a female can lay in her lifetime,” she said. One reason the effect is so big is that fireflies do not eat during their two-week adulthood. A slowly starving female can use a nuptial gift to build more eggs.
In at least some species, females may use flashes to pick out males with the biggest gifts. Dr. Lewis has tested this hypothesis in two species; in one, males with conspicuous flashes have bigger gifts. In another species, she found no link.
“In some cases they could be honest signals, and in some cases they could be deceptive signals,” Dr. Lewis said.
Deception may, in fact, evolve very easily among fireflies. It turns out that a male firefly does not need to burn many extra calories to make flashes. “It takes some energy, but it’s tiny. It’s less costly for a male than flying around,” Dr. Lewis said.
If making light is so cheap for males, it seems odd that they have not all evolved to be more attractive to females. “What is it that keeps their flashes from getting longer and longer or faster and faster?” Dr. Lewis asked.
Scanning the meadow, she grabbed her insect net and ran after a fast-flying firefly with a triple flash. She caught an animal that may offer the answer to her question. Dr. Lewis dropped the insect into a tube and switched on a headlamp to show her catch. Called Photuris, it is a firefly that eats other fireflies.
“They are really nasty predators,” Dr. Lewis said. Photuris fireflies sometimes stage aerial assaults, picking out other species by their flashes and swooping down to attack. In other cases, they sit on a blade of grass, responding to male fireflies with deceptive flashes. When the males approach, Photuris grabs them.
“They pounce, they bite, they suck blood — all the gory stuff,” Dr. Lewis said. She has found that each Photuris can eat several fireflies in a night. Photuris kills other fireflies only to retrieve bad-tasting chemicals from their bodies, which it uses to protect itself from predators.
To study how Photuris predation affects its firefly prey, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues built sticky traps equipped with lights that mimicked courtship signals of Photuris’s victims. The scientists found that Photuris was more likely to attack when flash rates were faster. In other words, conspicuous flashes — the ones females prefer — also make males more likely to be killed.
“At least where Photuris predators are around,” Dr. Lewis said, “there’s going to be a strong selection for less conspicuous flashes.”
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, also known as Corpse Bride, is a 2005 stop-motion-animation fantasy film directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton. It is based loosely on a 19th century Russian-Jewish folktale version of an older Jewish story and set in a fictional Victorian era village in Britain. Johnny Depp led an all-star cast as the voice of Victor and Helena Bonham Carter (for whom the project was specially created) voiced Emily, the title character.
The movie exhibits Burton's trademark style and recurring themes (the complex interaction between light and darkness, and of being caught between two irreconcilable worlds). Life is portrayed as boring and dully gray tinted while death is more fun, as evidenced by the brighter colors and jaunty music. The movie can be particularly compared to The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton's previous stop-motion feature project and Beetlejuice, especially in the scenes depicting the underworld and its deceased denizens.
The film was nominated in the 78th Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. It lost to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Plot
The story is set in a cold, gloomy Victorian era town in Britain. A shy young man by the name of Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), son of nouveau riche fishmongers Nell (Tracey Ullman) and William Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse), is due to be wed to beautiful young Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), daughter of corrupt, bankrupt hereditary aristocrats Maudeline, Lady Everglot (Joanna Lumley), and Finis, Lord Everglot (Albert Finney). The arranged marriage will elevate the Van Dorts to a higher level in society, while saving the Everglots from the poor house. Victor isn't too keen on the idea of an arranged marriage with a woman he's never met before until he meets the charming Victoria face-to-face. The two hit it off from the start despite their earlier misgivings. But after ruining the wedding rehearsal (and accidentally setting Victoria's mother's skirt on fire in the process), Victor is banished by Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee) until he can learn his wedding vows properly.
Victor wanders through the forest practicing his vows, consistently blundering them. At long last he gains confidence and successfully recites them, and upon spying a tree root that resembles a human hand, places his bride's wedding ring on it. No sooner has he done so, he realizes it really is a human hand as it comes to life and grabs him by the arm. Emerging from the frozen earth is the "Corpse Bride" Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a beautiful undead girl in a moldy, flowing wedding dress, and she declares Victor her husband.
Victor awakens after a black-out in a pub with the dead. He learns that he is in the Land of the Dead, and is told by a musical performing skeleton named Bonejangles (Danny Elfman) how Emily was jilted, murdered and robbed during her intended elopement, and has been waiting for her true love to come and claim her ever since. He flees the building, but Emily finds Victor and attempts to bond with him, giving him a wedding present of the live skeleton of his beloved and long-deceased puppy, Scraps. Dearly wishing to return to Victoria, Victor convinces the Bride and the old Elder Gutknecht (Michael Gough) to return them both temporarily to the Land of the Living via the Ukrainian Haunting Spell (the only way to return to the Land of the Dead is if either says "hopscotch") under the pretense of introducing her to his parents. Once they arrive, Victor tells Emily to stay put in the woods until he returns, and secretly reunites with Victoria. There he confesses his love for her, to which Victoria responds, relieved, that she feels the same about him. As they prepare to kiss, they are discovered by Emily; realizing the deception, Emily angrily spirits Victor back to the Land of the Dead before a helpless and terrified Victoria's eyes.
Emily feels betrayed and heartbroken by Victor's deception, and tells him so. Victor responds by saying that Victoria wasn't the "other woman" but that Emily was. He adds that they were just too different by saying that he was living and she was dead. After becoming thoroughly frustrated with Emily, he tells her that their marriage was a mistake and that he would "never marry her". Crestfallen, Emily leaves. Victor immediately regrets his words, but leaves Emily alone for the time being. Emily is horribly heartbroken, but begins to concede that maybe he and Victoria are meant for each other because they are both alive while Emily is not. Victoria, meanwhile tries to convince the pastor and her parents that Victor is in danger, but they express disbelief to her claims of a "corpse bride". Maudeline and Finis lock her in her room and plan a match with the presumably rich Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant) instead. Victoria, completely absorbed and troubled by Victor's disappearance, tries to argue with her parents by telling them she doesn't love Barkis, but fails terribly. Unknown to the others, Barkis intends to kill Victoria and make off with the fortune he believes she has.
Victor apologizes to Emily for his deception, and Emily's love for him is renewed as Victor sees that Emily is a kind girl, not a monster, and they begin to get along very well. Suddenly, an old acquaintance of Victor's dies and arrives in the Land of the Dead, delivering the news of Victoria's engagement, leaving Victor distraught and heartbroken. Emily, meanwhile, learns that her marriage to Victor is not official: the marriage vows bind the couple until "death do them part" and as Emily is already dead, the marriage won't apply to them until Victor is dead as well. The only way to validate their matrimony is if they return to the Land of the Living where they must re-recite their vows, after which Victor must kill himself by drinking the "Wine of Ages", an extremely potent poison. Emily does not believe Victor would ever want to bring such a grisly fate to himself, but Victor, thinking that Victoria has moved on with her life without him, decides to make the best of his situation (and bring happiness to Emily), and agrees to carry out the ceremony.
As Victoria is married to Barkis unwillingly, the residents of the Land of the Dead busy themselves preparing for a wedding of their own, rising up to the Land of the Living, storming the town and having a chaotic marriage "celebration" on their way to the church. In the ensuing chaos, the newly-wed Lord Barkis finally learns from Victoria that she is penniless. Meanwhile, there the villagers panic when their town is invaded by the dead, until both sides suddenly recognize their loved ones and are overjoyed by the temporary reunion.
Victoria heads for the church, and arrives as Victor is in the midst of the wedding ceremony that will culminate in his death. Emily spots the heartbroken Victoria, and realizes that Victor's death, while making her happy, will cheat Victoria out of a happy life herself. Emily calls off the ceremony just as Victor is about to drink the Wine of Ages, and gives him back to Victoria. The reunion is interrupted by Lord Barkis, who reminds the crowd that Victoria is still his wife, and starts to kidnap her at sword point. Emily is shocked and horrified as she recognizes Barkis as the man who not only jilted, but murdered and robbed her long ago. A sword fight ensues between Barkis and Victor (with Victor wielding a dinner fork tossed to him by a dead cook). Barkis corners Victor and is just about to jam his sword into Victor's stomach, when Emily rushes between them and blocks the blow with her chest, saving Victor's life while leaving herself completely unscathed.
A seething Emily orders Barkis to leave. The rest of the dead, outraged at what he did to Emily, try to stop him, but they are unable to interfere since he is of the living and therefore not under their power. But before leaving, he proposes a mock-toast to Emily and drinks the wine intended for Victor. As he turns to leave, he realizes too late that the wine is poisoned and dies within seconds. Now that he is one of them, the other dead are able to avenge Emily by dragging him through a side-door to make his afterlife a torment.
Emily begins to leave. When Victor stops her to fulfill his promise, she explains that he had already kept his promise by setting her free, and that now she shall do the same for him. She hands him Victoria's ring back, and continues to walk away. She pauses as she leaves the church to toss her bouquet to Victoria. As she reaches the threshold of the church, Emily finds peace herself and her body transforms into hundreds of butterflies. Victor and Victoria rush to the threshold and look on together at the sight. Victor then looks down at his soon to be bride lovingly and puts his arm around her as the butterflies flew higher into the moon.
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