Butterflies with unusual names

Foolish Swift, Lost-Egg Skipper, Morose Sailor, Dive-bomber, Blue Heart Playboy, Drop with Glasses, Sad Green Hairstreak, Garden Inspector, Question Mark, Poodle-face Sulphur, Zigzag Sleepy-head, Mediocre Skipper, Snow-flake, Shower of Gold, Noble Night-fighter, Noseburn Wanderer, One Pip Policeman, Queen of the Night, Wandering Donkey.

Selections from a list I found at Learn About Butterflies, where you can view photographs and read about life cycles for many hundreds of species worldwide.

Pictured above is the "Snowflake" from the Amazon rainforest -

Snowflakes are invariably encountered singly, usually when seen in flight at light gaps in the forest, where trees have fallen and sunlight penetrates to ground level. These tiny butterflies have a very slow and very persistent fluttering flight, flying for long periods but apparently going nowhere ! It is in fact possible to watch one of these delightful butterflies drifting and wafting about, but without travelling more than a few metres, for several minutes before it eventually settles.

Wattle Cup Caterpillar (Calcarifera ordinata)

This amazing-looking creature is the larval form of a rather unremarkable brown Cup moth, but as a caterpillar it is highly toxic.  It lives, with all the other toxic, poisonous, and venomous creatures, in Australia.

Photo credit to Nadia302, via The Twenty Most Toxic Caterpillars.   Another great photo here.

Julia butterfly

Perched on the tendril of a Passiflora plant, the egg of the Julia heliconian butterfly may be safe from hungry ants. This species lays its eggs almost exclusively on this plant's twisted vines.

And here's the butterfly:

Upper photo credit Martin Oeggerli, National Geographic.  Lower photo credit me.

Brahmin moth

Adult and caterpillar.  Photo credit to Igor Siwanowicz (gallery at the Telegraph).

Children hunt butterflies in Cambodia

If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to kill such eccentricities as appear.

- H.G. Wells, The Wonderful Visit (1895)

Modern sensibilities are, of course, that butterflies should be collected only as digital images. Economic realities are apparently a different matter in Cambodia.

Wells quote via The Project Gutenberg Project.

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia)

A late-summer immigrant to Wisconsin from more southerly regions; does not overwinter this far north.  I photographed this one this afternoon at the Grady Tract of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.  I would love to document a life cycle on this beautiful creature; perhaps next spring I can spot one ovipositing on some plantain.

Click photo for bigger.

Metamorphosis

Credit: Photos Julie Zickefoose. Produced by Mito Habe-Evans (NPR)

Insect highways in the sky

An NPR video narrated by the incomparable Robert Krulwich, found at The Bug Girl's Blog, via Boing Boing.

Processionary caterpillars

Several British news sources posted the above photo of caterpillars crossing a road -

This incredible convoy is the ultimate commuter train - a trail of tiny caterpillars heading off into the bush. An amazing 136 caterpillars wriggled top-to-toe across a road on their migratory route in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The delicate insects were linked by a single thin silk thread which set their path out into the bush, where they will eventually turn into butterflies. Jamie Rooney, from High Wycombe, Bucks, was visiting South Africa for the World Cup when he snapped the crawling convoy.

They didn't offer any details about the biology, which took me a while to track down.  They appear to be "processionary caterpillars."  They are the larvae of moths (not butterflies), have nasty urticating hairs, and are capable of defoliating their host plants.  The silk on the trail is for grip, not for guidance, which is determined by pheromones and buy tactile stimulation by the setae of the preceding caterpillar.  More info and pix at this link.

Photo credit.

Addendum: Found quite a bit more info at this Catalonian site, including this cautionary observation -

Veterinary services have many emergency calls at the time when the caterpillars are migrating to the ground as inquisitive dogs can get too close to the intriguing procession and may pick up the hairs onto their paws, these irritate and so they lick them. Once the hairs are on the lips/tongue it will induce itching, swelling and possibly vomiting. Look out for the symptoms of : small white spots in the mouth and on the tongue, excessive drooling and chomping. In some cases partial amputation of the tongue is the only course of action.

Black Swallowtail "mating avoidance flight pattern"

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to pick a day for a hike when huge numbers of butterflies were out.  Sulphurs had emerged from alfalfa fields by the thousands, Monarchs were migrating, Pearl Crescents were on the goldenrod, but best of all the Black Swallowtails were out in force.  I usually consider myself lucky to see one or two; that afternoon I saw over a dozen in one field.

And as I watched, I saw a phenomenon I'd never encountered before.   Mating behavior is pretty easy to spot in this species, because they are large butterflies, and there's a subtle color diffference between male and female, and they are not very territorial, so when you see a "chase" you know it's a prelude to (attempted) procreation.

That afternoon I watched a female rebuff a male by flying away from the thistle where he had approached her.  He gave chase.  Instead of flying horizontally, she started to go vertical.  Totally vertical.  She was flapping herself up and up and up and up - to I would guess over a hundred feet in the air.  He was following along right behind her.  Understand these are large, powerful fliers who can move like the wind horizontally, but the vertical ascent was much slower and more laborious.  I watched these two black specks get smaller in the sky, and then...

Then she plummeted to earth.  I don't mean that she flew down.  She fell like a rock.  It was hard to see exactly, but it appeared that she just folded her wings above her head and let gravity take her down, because I didn't see even a flutter.  The poor male was left hovering a hundred feet in the air wondering where in the hell she had gone.  I would guess his pursuit is based on pheromones rather than visuals, so her sudden descent, probably right through her previous pheromone trail, might be totally undetectable.

I didn't see this just once.  I saw it four times with at least three different groups of BSTs, so I'm confident it was a standard avoidance maneuver rather than an accident or the quirk of an individual.  Later I spoke to a friend who's much more knowledgeable about butterfly behavior than I am, and he indicated that this type of flight pattern is well recognized, and has been documented among other butterflies, some of whom use it as a predator avoidance mechanism.  He suggested that I should document this somewhere - so that's why I'm writing this blog post.

Predatory and parasitic wasps

To butterfly enthusiasts, wasps are the vespa non grata of the insect world.  The first problems arise from predatory wasps - the kind that pick up caterpillars whole and carry them off.  I had a frustrating summer trying to raise Cabbage Whites on Brassica plants, even up on a balcony away from ants and slugs.  Eggs would appear, then small caterpillars, then bigger ones, then... gone.  They weren't wandering - they were being abducted, presumably by wasps carrying them off to burrows (although I never saw the malefactors, so it's possible that birds or other predators may have been responsible).

To cope with predators of that sort, the cheapest response is to wrap the host plant in tulle - the same fabric used for wedding decorations.  Shown above is tulle covering a flat of milkweed and wrapped over a pot of cabbage.

A much more difficult problem arises when dealing with parasitic wasps.  I posted a gruesome but utterly fascinating video back in January, showing the larvae of parasitic wasps bursting out of the body of a caterpillar, whose brain has been hijacked as well, so that it spins a protective cocoon over the emerged larvae.  And a little over a year ago I posted two photos of the remarkable Ichneumon wasp (click on the lower of those two pix to see her magnificent ovipositors).

I had originally thought that the tulle wrapping of the host plants would keep out the parasitic wasps (it would certainly exclude an adult Ichneumon wasp).   I was therefore somewhat dismayed to see Ed Yong's report earlier this year about the sensory skills of Trichogramma wasps.  The part about anti-aphrodisiacs was interesting, but what opened my eyes was this photo -

- showing the parasitic wasp to be smaller than the eyeball of the butterfly.  I don't think my tulle (or my more recently-acquired paint-straining fabric) has any chance against that little bugger.

The other photo at Ed's article shows that the wasps are smaller than the butterfly's eggs, and that's part of the problem, because even when I bring butterfly eggs in to an enclosure to raise them, it's possible that they were parasitized even before they hatch.  More about that later when I show the havoc wrought by parasitic flies on immature Red Admirals.

The Monarch migration has begun

Most people understand that Monarch butterflies in North America migrate south for the winter.  That process has now begun, and those interested can track the process at the Journey North website.

During the migratory process, Monarchs often gather in tree "roosts" for overnight stays.  Along the migratory route these are not nearly as spectacular as the enormous ones in Southern California or the ultimate ones at the Mexican terminus, but they are awesome spectacles nonetheless.  I've had the good fortune to see one once while hiking.  The map embedded above, from the Journey North website, shows the location of roosts reported so far.

Here is a brief amateur video of a tree roost.  The video is low resolution, but it gives a flavor of the event, and the videographer has had the good taste not to spoil the images with some irrelevant music or commentary.

Discouraging butterfly releases at weddings

The North American Butterfly Association discourages the release of butterflies at weddings.

  Butterflies raised by unregulated commercial interests may spread diseases and parasites to wild populations, with devastating results. Often, butterflies are released great distances from their points of origin, resulting in inappropriate genetic mixing of different populations when the same species is locally present. When it is not, a non-native species is being introduced in the area of release. At best, this confuses studies of butterfly distribution and migration; at worst, it may result in deleterious changes to the local ecology.

   In addition, these releases create a commercial market for live butterflies (currently about $10/apiece), with the result that, for example, the Monarch overwintering sites in Mexico and on the California coast are now targets for poachers.

More at the link.

Butterfly eggs

Colorized SEM images from a gallery at National Geographic by Martin Oeggerli at the Prüftechnik Uri and School of Applied Sciences, FHNW [presumably Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz].  Top to bottom:

Owl butterfly egg (Caligo memnon) - At the center is a minute opening, called a micropyle, through which the sperm enters the egg.

Red lacewing butterfly egg (Cethosia biblis) - the lacy pattern marks the micropyle, where sperm enters. A similar design appears on the scaly wings that gave the red lacewing butterfly its name.

Large white butterfly egg (Pieris brassicae)

Zebra longwing butterfly egg (Heliconius charithonia) - The egg contains cyanide and other toxins ingested by adults from the plants they eat.

Lachryphagous lepidoptera

David Attenborough explains.

I've previously reported about lachryphagous moths, including this interesting cited observation:

"The highly specialized Lobocraspis griseifusa does not wait for an animal’s eyes to moisten. When it has landed, it sweeps its proboscis across the eye of its unfortunate host, irritating the eyeball, encouraging it to produce tears. It can even insert its proboscis between the eyelids, ensuring it can feed even while its host is sleeping. Whereas a moth of the genus Poncetia goes to the opposite extreme. It’s proboscis is so short it must cling to the eyeball itself to drink. But it must be careful. If its weeping host blinks, the moth is often crushed to death.”

I've never personally had butterflies come to my face, but it's not uncommon when in the field for them to land on a shirt or arm eager to get some salty sweat.  Here is a Common Wood Nymph exploring the interstices of the strap on my trekking pole:

Video via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

"Moth" costume

Recognize the actress?  (answer at the Lushlight source)

Sir Winston Churchill - butterfly enthusiast

The former prime minister and wartime leader converted a summer house in the grounds of his home Chartwell in Kent at the end of the Second World War [into a butterfly house]...

[While working on his 1940 "The Few" speech] Churchill was planning the butterfly house and once it was completed he would sit on the benches and watch the butterflies emerge from the chrysalis before releasing them into the garden...

“As a young man he was a serious butterfly collector on his travels across the world and later would have spent many a summer day enjoying the beauty of butterflies in his garden at Chartwell.”

Butterflies are tough

Everyone thinks of them as delicate creatures, but butterflies are remarkably resilient - capable of flying when major portions of the wings have been broken off or worn away, capable of surviving outdoors in 40-below-zero winter weather.  And, as this video demonstrates, capable of surviving under unusual circumstances.  The video is low-resolution, but it looks to me to be an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, which is a large and vigorous butterfly.

Context: "A dragonfly attacks a butterfly midair, and they land in the creek. As the butterfly struggles to escape, a nearby snapping turtle notices the two and comes in for a closer look..."

This Tiger survived a bird attack

Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus) are not long-distance migrators like Monarchs, but they are powerful fliers - perhaps because their food plants are trees (cherry, chokecherry, ash, cottonwood, poplar, willow, birch, apple, maple, basswood).  They descend from the trees down to our garden to nectar, and like hummingbirds they seem to prefer tubular flowers like Monarda, where they can take advantage of their long proboscis.

I photographed this one sunning on a leaf because I was interested in how white his wings are (the classic color is a pale yellow).  It wasn't until I was processing the photos that I noticed the linear notch in his right forewing [click photo to enlarge].  He clearly has survived an attack by a bird; it's impressive how much structural damage butterflies can sustain to their wings and still remain aerodynamically intact.

Swarming tigers

Tiger swallowtails - but still impressive.  Video from a butterfly sanctuary in southwest Virginia.

This and one other butterfly bush near the top of our sloped garden are the favorites. We have 60 butterfly bushes, about 15 harlequin glory bower trees, 7 large beds of mexican sunflowers, 7 large beds of zinnias, hundreds of purple coneflowers, about 30 huge cup plants, many brazilian verbena and homestead purple verbena and verbena hastata and hundreds of other butterfly nectar and host plants. The butterlies visit most of these plants but not in the numbers you saw on the video. The most butterflies I've counted on any of my 10-minute walks through our one-acre butterfly sanctuary this year has been 135.