A Little Late and Some Camouflage

First off, I'd like to apologize for my slight lateness in getting this out. That aside, I returned to the butterfly biome yesterday, a Monday as usual. Mondays are busier for recently emerged butterflies, as they've had the whole weekend to emerge and dry off. I was releasing them into their biome and there were so many that had accumulated. Every few months the shipments of the types of butterflies change, so there's usually lots of new and interesting types after a while. For keeping up the Christmas spirit, besides decorating the exhibit in Christmas lights, we received a lot of festive Rice Paper butterflies (Idea leuconoe This is very exciting, especially for me, because Rice Papers are my favorite. They're a very calm species and usually while I'm transferring all the butterflies out of their cocoon chambers, I let a few rice papers sit and walk around on my arms.

I've really noticed, especially after this visit, that the butterflies with the most natural predators and most advanced camouflage tend to be the flittiest. Two species that I noticed with really great camouflage and flitty personalities were the Brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni) and the small Glasswing butterfly (Greta Oto). I didn't realize the Brimstone butterflies were alive at first as their camouflage is looking like a 3D leaf- they are absolutely amazing in person. A few of these ones were sort of calm, but there were some others that wouldn't let me come close at all. The Greta Ora was a similar story. There's quite a few species with at least a some transparent areas of their wings, but the Greta Ora is mostly transparent and very small. They were hard to find to say the least. It didn't help that they didn't want to be found.

On the complete other side of the spectrum were species like the Atlas moth (Attacus atlas) and the Rice Papers. The Atlas moth is one of the largest moth species in the world. I'm pretty sure they have very few natural predators, and they tend to be lazy. They live only around 4-5 days as they have no mouthparts to eat with as adults. I cannot stress this enough- they are so lazy. I got to pick one up today which was just beyond cool. I left it on a Christmas tree in the exhibit, but I let it choose where on the tree- it really liked the snowflake ornaments.

The species I can probably observe best is the Rice Papers. They really do remind me of little puppies. When I let them crawl around on me, they tend to be slower and lazy, and they don't like flying off. I've heard that they're some of the friendliest towards museum guests. There's multiple possible reasons as to why they're so nonchalant. The first is that they're in the same family as the Monarch. This means that they taste horrible to their natural predators, who stay far away. Another more interesting reason is that the males can give off pheromones that calm down the females. I think this combination causes them to achieve their sleepy-puppy state.