Fantastic slo-mo video of butterfly courtship

October 16, 2014 • 5:36 am

by Matthew Cobb

This video was posted on Instagram and tw**ted by @phil_torres, who took the video *and edited it* on his iPhone 6. It really is quite astonishing! Phil reckons the species is Heliconius ismeniusThe male is flying, the female is resting. The movement of the male’s abdomen up and down involves casting pheromones down in an attempt to seduce his inamorata…

We’ve featured Phil’s photos a number of times here. Heliconius ismenius is one half of the original ‘Batesian mimicry’ system, where the warning signals of a toxic species (in this case Heliconius) are copied by a non-toxic species.

~

7 thoughts on “Fantastic slo-mo video of butterfly courtship

  1. This video doesn;t show up for me in Firefox, but that sometimes happens with for-Apple-people-only videos. I suspect they don’t even test their content on other browsers?

Comments are closed.