Category: lepidopterans

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 27, 2024 • 8:15 am

Send ’em in, folks! I’m running a bit low. . .

Today’s photos come from Mayaan Levy, whose captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Pacific crest trail animals

All photos were taken by my husband Micah on his Pacific crest trail (PCT) thru-hike last summer. Thru-hiking means having a continuous footpath, and hiking the trail in one go, and he had dreamt of achieving this impressive feat for about 12 years. This was his third attempt – the first was cut short due to work constraints and the second due to knee injury. But third time’s the charm – he walked from Mexico to Canada. Here you can read more about the PCT for those of you who are interested: https://www.pcta.org/

This will probably be a first batch out of three: animals, plants and views from the PCT. All photos were taken with a pixel 7 smartphone. Several quick notes before we begin:

The trail is not only for 20-somethings, and Micah noted how many people in their 50s and 60s he met along the way and how fit and fast they were. Just sayin’ – if that’s your dream – go for it!

I did the species identification and some might be wrong – please contribute the correct ID if you know it.Captions and text are written by me but are paraphrased from Micah’s stories about the trail.

The desert

Looks barren, but is full of life. The air is clear and crisp at sunrise then turns dusty and hazy with some warm winds from the east and the day’s heat. At sunset, reds and pinks give way to deep purple as hikers go to sleep at a billion-star hotel.

Sun spider of some type (order Solifugae) – it’s not a scorpion! And also not a spider! To the best of my understanding they don’t have any venom.

Pacific gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer):

Long-nosed leopard lizard (Gambelia wislizenii):

The Sierra Nevada

The mountains high in thin air, snow all around, gushing rivers and pine trees galore! The Sierras are considered the most difficult section of the PCT and also probably the most beautiful. I did the section too with Micah on his second attempt, including summiting Mt. Whitney on the summer solstice.

abiete coni figmentum imaginationis – some hikers having fun (and me getting to practice my Latin).

Sagebrush chekerspot (Chlosyne acastus):

Yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventer) – marmots are hilarious. They tend to not be scared of people, and instead will try to get into your bag and steal your food. Sometimes they also like to pose for photos, and sometimes they tan on the rocks looking stoned:

Speaking of food thieves, in the Sierra hikers are required to carry bear canisters, which you can imagine as a bucket-size child (bear)-proof pill bottles. Information boards for hikers in Yosemite national park read: “if you have too much food and not all of it fits in the canister, stop! Sit and eat! Then try again.” In northern California most hikers ship their heavy bear canister back home. However, bears are clever animals and they have learned that food can be had at this location. Micah has set up his tent about 10 miles after shipping out his canister, only to have a bear circle his tent all night.

Another food thief, and the most dexterous one (I’ve seen them open zippers): the common raccoon (Procyon lotor), aka trash panda. They like to hang out around campgrounds, steal food and then act all innocent and go wash their hands:

Yes, there’s a lot of talk about food on trail – it’s probably the number one conversation topic.

Oregon and Washington

Yay Volcanos! The cascade range is magical in its deep, dark colors. And despite last year being extremely dry, you can tell that this environment is water-rich.

Cascades frog (Rana cascadae) – I think their skin is somewhat toxic to the touch, but I might be wrong:

This is a “find the animal” photo – there are actually two mammals here, sharing a habitat in the fog that’s so frequent in Washington’s mountains:

Pika (family Ochotonidea) – and the cutest animal on the PCT award goes to the pikas. They chirp (not sure that’s the right descriptor for their calls) saying “pet me!”, “adopt me!”. Unlike marmots which hibernate for the majority of the year, pikas run around in their rocky castles and continue to be cute throughout the winter:

Spruce grouse (Canachites Canadensis) spotted less than 10 miles from Canada:

Homo sapiens (I’m sure about this ID) – this is me in the photo. I joined Micah for Washington (Bridge of the Gods to the US-Canada border):

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 26, 2024 • 8:15 am

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has returned with one of his patented text-and-photo stories of biology.  Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.

Gone with the wind

As the sun rose on the morning of 28 October 2013, a painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) came out of nighttime torpor, spread its wings to warm up and start a busy day. Were the butterfly to be conscious and self-aware, it would know right away it had gone through a rough patch. Its wings were worn out and ragged in places. If the butterfly looked around, it would see it had company: other painted ladies, all equally battered, mingled nearby. They were on a beach fringed by unfamiliar vegetation and, curiouser and curiouser, the sea seemed to be on the wrong side. It didn’t look at all like West Africa, from where they took off 5 to 8 days before. The perceptive butterfly would be right: they had ended up in French Guiana, over 4,200 km away from home across the Atlantic Ocean.

The painted lady is one of the most cosmopolitan of all butterflies, absent only from Antarctica and South America © Muséum de Toulouse, Wikimedia Commons:

Painted ladies are committed frequent flyers, constantly on the move to keep up with seasonal food plants. Every spring they set out from tropical Africa to Europe across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, only to go back in the autumn. The 15,000-km round trip of successive generations between Africa and Europe is the longest migratory flight recorded for butterflies. But crossing the Atlantic Ocean, as registered by Suchan et al. (2024), is a much tougher challenge altogether: no stopovers for feeding, no respite from the weather. How did the painted ladies make it through the gruelling journey alive?

Routes of painted lady spring migration from North Africa to Europe © Sémhur, Wikimedia Commons:

A fellow traveller, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), may offer some clues. Every year, monarchs depart from their breeding grounds in southern Canada and northern USA in September and October, arriving at their overwintering sites in Central Mexico in November. Migrating monarchs cruise at energy-saving speeds of about 9 km/h, slower than a person jogging (although there’s a quite a large variation in butterflies’ speed estimates), so they have to slog away to manage distances of over 4,000 km.

Monarch butterfly southbound migration patterns © U.S. Forest Service:

For some insects such as dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata), flight is bimotoric, that is, controlled by forewings and hindwings. Others such as grasshoppers, crickets and related species (Orthoptera) have posteromotoric flight (driven by hindwings). Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) are anteromotoric fliers: their flight is controlled primarily by the forewings (Dudley, 2002). But hindwings don’t have a secondary role in butterflies’ locomotion: they are exceptionally well-developed and are coupled with the forewings to flap in synchrony, so that butterflies in general have the largest wing area relative to body mass of all flying insects and perhaps all flying animals, a feature of great help for migrating species.

An efficient flying machine: a female monarch © Kenneth Dwain Harrelson, Wikimedia Commons:

Still, flapping their wings alone would not do: fat reserves would soon be depleted. So, monarchs use skills familiar to aircraft pilots; they glide, taking advantage of air currents and thermals. By holding their wings motionless, their fore- and hindwings overlapping to form a single aerodynamic surface, monarchs gain altitude by soaring in rising air currents, just like birds do. This technique is the most energy-efficient travelling method regarding distances travelled. With good weather and tail winds, monarchs can soar to at least 300 m above the ground and glide for very long distances (Gibo & Pallett, 1979).

Monarchs, birds and glider pilots fly towards a cliff or building to be carried over the top of the obstacle by the deflected air and rise to a higher altitude © Aerospaceweb.org:

Suchan et al. (2024) estimated that painted ladies’ travel would be limited to about 780 km without refuelling. Even if they could feed and despite favourable winds, they wouldn’t go beyond 1,900 km by flapping their wings. Painted ladies must have glided along the northeasterly trade winds, the prevailing winds from West Africa to northwestern South America – the same winds that helped the Portuguese and Spanish to colonize the New World. Based on what has been observed for monarchs, painted ladies must have glided about 85% of the time taken for their trans-continental flight. This dispersal ability could explain the sudden appearance of gaggles of them in places as diverse as the French Riviera, Gaza, Madagascar, the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, and in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle (Shields, 1992):

A model of wind trajectories 48 h before painted ladies were observed in French Guiana © Suchan et al., 2024:

Big and conspicuous wings allow butterflies to travel far, but they also attract hostile characters such as hungry birds. To reduce their chances of ending their lives as juicy morsels, butterflies must take evasive actions. Their well-developed hind wings allow them to make abrupt turns with just a couple of wing flaps, giving them outstanding manoeuvrability. Most butterflies fly erratically, often zig-zagging with no discernible patterns. If you ever tried to catch a butterfly in the air, you know how expertly they evade pursuers. Irregular, chaotic flight patterns can frustrate and discourage the most relentless predator, who quite likely would give up the chase by pragmatically convincing itself in a sour-grapes fashion that the intended prey is ‘mostly wrapper and little candy’ (Jantzen & Eisner, 2008).

A gentleman failing to impress the ladies with his hunting skills. Catching butterflies in Venetian canal, 1854 © Antonio Rotta, Wikimedia Commons:

Butterflies elicit feelings of vulnerability and tenderness, but aesthetics are not good ecological yardsticks. These insects are well-adapted to the vagaries of life, including inclement weather, food deprivation and threat of predation. Some species are perfectly capable of travelling – voluntarily or not – distances that would defeat tougher-looking creatures. These feats of endurance must be relevant for the dispersal and colonisation of hitchhiking propagules such as spores and pollen, but such effects are yet to be extensively investigated. Meanwhile, we may carry on appreciating butterflies’ beauty, knowing that their perceived fragility is deceiving.

Butterflies are not the delicate creatures of our imagination © Samuel Hubbard Scudder, 1881, Wikimedia Commons:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 22, 2024 • 8:15 am

This being Sunday, John Avise is here with some pictures, and remember that he’s moved on to butterflies. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

First, I’d like to wish all WEIT readers a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Coynezaa, or whatever else you may be celebrating during this special season.  This week continues the series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Bramble Green Hairstreak (Callophrys dumetorum):

Brazilian Skipper (Calpodes ethlius), underwing:

Brown Elfin, Callophrys augustinus:

Cabbage White (Pieris rapae), male:

Cabbage White, female:

Cabbage White, underwing:

California Dogface (Zerene eurydice), male underwing:

JAC: This butterfly was on a stamp:

Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Designed by Stanley Galli., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

California Dogface female underwing:

California Dogface, male upperwing:

California Dogface, female upperwing:

California Dogface, larvae on False Indigo Bush (Amorpha fruticosa):

California Hairstreak (Satyrium californica):

California Ringlet (Coenonympha california), dark morph:

California Ringlet, light morph:

California Ringlet, mating pair:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Several people sent batches of photographs in, and many thanks to them. We have enough for about a week.

Today’s Sunday, which means that we have photos from biologist John Avise, who has moved from birds to lepidopterans. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Butterflies in North America, Part 2 

This week continues the series on butterflies that I have photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.

Atala (Eumaeus atala), underwing:

Atlantis Fritillary (Speyeria atlantis):

Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton):

Baltimore Checkerspot, underwing:

Barred Sulphur (Phoebis philea) underwing:

Behr’s Metalmark (Apodemia virgulti), topwing:

Behr’s Metalmark underwing:

Bernadino (square-spotted) Blue (Euphilotes allyni), male topwing:

Bernardino Blue, female:

Bernardino Blue, underwing:

Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), male:

Black Swallowtail, underwing:

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 24, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have a surprise from biologist John Avise: butterfly photos. And he reminds us of how many times his photos have appeared here (they’ve all been of birds):

You’ve posted a total of more than 3500 of my avian photographs across 231 Sundays!  I thought it might be time to start sending some other wildlife that I’ve photographed, so this week let’s start a long series on butterflies of North America.

Butterflies in North America, Part 1 

Longtime readers of WEIT might rightly suspect that I photograph only birds.  But that is far from correct.  In truth, almost any wildlife is fair game for my camera.  This week I exemplify this point by beginning a many-part series on butterflies that I have photographed over the years in North America (mostly in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Colorado, or California).  In general, I find butterflies to be much easier to photograph than birds, because they often sit still nearby.  Typically, I use the same 300 mm telephoto lens that I use for birds, except that the butterflies are much closer to me so the focal distance becomes critical.  I’m six feet tall, and butterflies perched near my feet happen to be at a perfect distance for close-up photos with that lens.

Acmon Blue (Icaricia acmon), male topwing:

Acmon Blue, male underwing:

Acmon Blue, female topwing:

Acmon Blue, female underwing:

American Copper (Lycaena phlaeas), topwing:

American Copper, underwing:

American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis), topwing:

American Lady, underwing:

Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon), topwing:

Anise Swallowtail, underwing:

Aphrodite Fritillary (Speyeria aphrodite), topwing:

Aphrodite Fritillary, underwing:

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 21, 2024 • 8:15 am

Regular contributor Mark Sturtevant has once again sent us a batch of lovely insect photos, including some arachnids and one mammal). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The first part of this set are photographs from the gardens around my house, and then we move out to area parks. I live in eastern Michigan.

The lovely beetle shown in the first picture is a Lily Leaf Beetle (Lilioceris lilii). These become common on the lilies that the wife likes to grow, and they are a minor pest on them as they riddle the plants with holes. I had never seen the larvae, but while preparing this post I had learned that they hide under the leaves and I simply never looked there. The larvae are disgusting, as they cover themselves with their droppings as a deterrent. I should definitely photograph some next season!:

Next up is another example of Say’s Mantidfly (Dicromantispa sayi). In my last post I had shown a female, and this is a smaller male. This species of Mantidfly grows up by living and feeding inside the egg sacs of spiders, and there are always jumping spiders on our shed and that is where I find Mantidflies:

Back in the garden there is always drama of one kind or another. I was very elated one day to find a Cuckoo wasp foraging at the daisies, as shown in the next picture. I won’t be able to identify the species without careful inspection, but these beautiful wasps are usually challenging to photograph since they are normally very alert and active. I simply got lucky here. Cuckoo wasps are so-named because they are kleptoparasites in the nests of wasps or bees. Besides feeding on the provisions meant for the larvae of their hosts, they also eat the host eggs or larvae as well:

Predators commonly stay among the daisies in the garden, including the crab spiders shown in the next two pictures. I believe these are Misumenoides formosipes, based on the ridge that I could see just underneath the frontal eyes. The second picture shows one that has taken a Green Bottle Fly, Lucilia sericata:

Next are pictures taken from local parks. Here is one of our larger species of skipper butterfly, the Indigo Duskywing, Erynnis baptisiae. One can generally recognize skippers since they are usually moth-like butterflies, and they have distinctly hooked-shaped clubs on their antennae. In my younger years it was believed that skippers were a separate group from butterflies, but now they are found to be within the latter. And while we are at it, butterflies are now understood to be descended from moths, but let’s move on:

The remaining pictures were all taken on one day at a flower-filled and very productive meadow near where I work. There are more pictures from that park from this day, but those will have to wait for later.

First up is this extremely metallic Dogbane Beetle (Chrysochus auratus). These are vegetarian on a narrow range of host plants, including Dogbane, which makes the insects toxic:

The beetle shown in the next picture had me stumped for a while, but the distinctly “flabellate” antennae and an old field guide helped me to narrow it down. This is a kind of Wedge-shaped beetle, Macrosiagon limbata, and that surprised me since it does not resemble the one species that I know from this obscure family. This one is a male, identified by its antennae. Females will lay eggs on flowers, and the active larvae that hatch will clamber onto a passing bee to be taken back to the nest. There they will consume the larvae in the nest:

Many Bergamot flowers were in the field, and they were well tended by many of these clear-winged sphinx moths (Hemaris sp), and you can see tthat it is a bumble bee mimic:

The final insect-related pictures show why I spend much time carefully looking under leaves. I will likely never learn the species names of these insects, however. The white mass on the right is a bundle of cocoons from the Braconidae family of wasps, which are small wasps that are parasitoids inside the bodies of caterpillars. The term “parasitoid” is preferred here, rather than parasite, since the insects live inside the bodies of their hosts – parasite-like – but they quite deliberately and slowly kill their host, while parasites aren’t supposed to do that on purpose. The eviscerated caterpillar has fallen away, unfortunately, but while it was there it would be laying across the cocoons, still barely alive for a time, and actively “protecting” the cocoons in a strange example of how a hosts’ behavior is changed by parasitoid wasps. I have seen this many times, and you can see it as well in this very entertaining Ze Frank video that Jerry posted recently.

But that isn’t all. What are those black thingies to the left? Well, those are the pupae of a kind of hyperparasitic wasp – very small wasps that are parasitoids of the parasitoids. I had seen these mini-tombstones of pupae many times on plants, but this is the first time that I had enough context to understand the bigger picture about them. If you look carefully you will see an adult wasp among the pupae – a detail that I did not see at the time. Based on some findings in BugGuide, I suggest that this second group is from the Eulophidae family, as shown in the linked picture:

Next is a close-up of the Eulophid pupae. This required the Raynox 250 diopter lens to boost the power of the macro lens. The yellow stuff next to the pupae is called meconium, and they are the gut contents of the hyperparasitoid larvae. When a larva pupates, it will first purge its gut contents:

When I excitedly showed this amazing story to the wife, she was quite horrified.

After a pleasant and very productive afternoon spent in the flower-filled meadow, I noticed that I was being watched by a curious onlooker:

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 16, 2024 • 8:15 am

After today’s photos, we have only tomorrow’s photos, the regular Sunday contribution by John Avise.  After Sunday: bupkes! Please send in your wildlife photos.

Today we have the fifth and final set of photos taken by reader Chris Taylor on his recent trip to Queensland (see here for earlier photos).  Chris’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This is the final part of the photographs from Queensland.

In the final week of the trip, we spent the time back on the coast, visiting a number of locations.

This is the white form of the Pacific Reef Heron, Egretta sacra, seen on the rocks at Flying Fish Point.

There are a number of Mistletoes in Australia, most of which are parasitic on other trees and shrubs such as Eucalypts. The seed needs to be deposited on the branch of the host tree where it can germinate and grow its roots under the bark of the host tree. Mistletoes have coevolved with the Mistletoe Bird and a strategy has developed to ensure this is not left to chance. The seeds of the plant are enclosed in a fruit that attracts the bird to eat it. The seed quickly passes through the gut of the bird, which then defecates the seed onto the host plant. The seed retains a sticky coating which fixes the seed onto the branch, ready to grow and infect the host.

Mistletoe Bird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum, eating a berry of Jointed Mistletoe, Viscum articulatum, which is growing on a small eucalypt tree.

Nearby was one of the Clearwing Swallowtail butterflies, Cressida cressida. Unusually for a butterfly, they have few scales on the front wings, giving them a translucent appearance

Next, we went south to the area at the foot of the Wooroonooran range. The two highest peaks in Queensland, Mt Bartle Frere and Mount Bellenden Ker, are in this range. Although not tall by comparison to other mountain ranges, at only 1622m and 1593m elevation respectively, the range undoubtedly has a big effect on the weather of the Wet Tropics. We stopped in the town of Babinda, claims to be the wettest place in Australia, a distinction also claimed by the nearby town of Tully. Both of these towns have an annual average of more than 4.25 metres of rain. Because of the high rainfall, there are a number of pristine rivers flowing out of the range, such as Babinda Creek, here flowing out of the rainforest cloaking the slopes of the mountains

The mountains are made up of a lot of hard granitic rocks, and so there are a number of waterfalls in the range; these are the Josephine Falls

On the flatlands below the range is the Eubenangee Swamp. There is a small nature reserve here with a short hike through the rainforest. Lots of birds were calling, along with a colony of Fruit Bats. But they all kept up in the canopy, where they were well hidden, so the smaller denizens were the ones that caught our attention. For some reason most of the insects we saw here were dark in colour!

This butterfly is the Evening Brown, Melanitis leda. This insect is remarkable in that it takes two different forms, dependent upon the season. This is the Dry season form, which resembles a dried-up leaf. The Wet season form has a lighter brown colour and black and white spots.

Also here were some Dingy brown, Mycalesis perseus.

And Yellow-eyed Plane, Neptis praslini:

Even the dragonflies here had dark wings! This is the Painted Grasshawk, Neurothemis stigmatizans.

In the dim light of the rainforest canopy, there was an exception to this rule. This is the Red-banded Jezebel, Delias mysis.

We left Eubenangee in the late afternoon, as the sun was making a light show through the Wooroonooran range, a finale to our stay in Queensland. Next day we caught the plane to fly back to Canberra.