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OP
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Have you all been observing an unusually high number of butterflies this spring? On Sunday, my parents and I counted literally dozens of butterflies feasting over phlox and azaleas. We didn't remember ever having seen such a profusion of butterflies in recent years. It just could have been a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but I thought to ask here...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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You must of is got them all down there in Dim-witty. We ain' seen none here in South Podunk.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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if'n Fald and ASp tain't seen 'em, we sure hain't...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>Have you all been observing an unusually high number of butterflies this spring?
I'll be sure and let you know, when spring comes in.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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they should be going the other direction for you, max... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I saw my first butterfly of the spring today. It will be a few weeks before any population explosion of insects becomes apparent ... most of the critters prefer to remain hidden until the frost danger is minimal.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I saw quite a few in Puerto Rico, but am unsure how many are to be expected there. I will see if I can find out.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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We continue to see hoards of butterflies. Quite amazing. The flowers must be unusually sweet this spring!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bingley
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OP
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The sky is falling, Bingley? (Believe me--I'm just trying to avoid grappling with what could be the too bitter possibilities.)
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Like you, Wordwind, I believe that I have seen more butterflies flittering about this spring than in any past spring that I can remember, but in my case I can't be sure; sometimes just seeing a few of these flying splashes of dazzling colors seem to be a hundred.
This depends, I think, on the extent of my ability to notice.
So anyway, to double check my initial impression I planned to spend this past weekend checking some woodland clearings nearby with the intent to report my findings back here to you tonight. But thunderstorms broke out all over North Alabama so I stayed home and now have nothing to report. Then why am I reporting? Well, because of a butterfly, or, more accurately, a giant moth.
Late last night as I sat at my computer checking Animal Safari to see if anyone had posted any information about finding a preponderance of butterflies in the south , I heard a loud "thump" on the plate glass window to my left.
Thump! Thump! Thump! I jumped up! Damnation ...a crazed bloodsucking bat was trying to break through two layers of hard glass to kill me. On the next "thump" I saw it more clearly, it wasn't a bat it was a pale green ghastly thing about seven inches long- a giant Luna Moth with wings that trailed like a long translucent gown beneath its white furry body. I walked over and turned off the overhead light in the computer room and the lust-crazed beautiful bug stopped its incessant thumping.
I felt a little smug. Only I knew why the Luna Moth stopped beating her head against the window pane when I turned out the light; most laypeople think moths behave so stupidly because moths are biologically attracted to light, but now, I know better, because two months ago I bought a book entitled "An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with A Singular Insect" and that is why I am reporting here tonight.
Sharman Apt Russell, a Quaker by belief, is a most remarkable woman. Her book above was written "With the allure of a poet and the clarity of a scientist" according to the Boston Herald, and I wholeheartedly agree. Here are some excerpts from her book...
Chapter Five: Butterfly Brains
...Butterflies in this genus have good memories. They remember favorite flowers. They remember favorite roosting sites. They remember to hold a grudge, avoiding spots where some scientist captured them days earlier.
In one laboratory only the Heliconus could remember not to fly into the fluorescent bulbs.
They score about a 2 on the SAT scores.
Chapter Seven: Love Stories
Male Queens also have brushlike organs, or hairpencils, tucked away in their abdomens. When a male sees a female, he inserts his hairpencils into his hindwing gland and gathers his personal scent. Now he flies under and ahead of the female, expands his hairpencils, and dusts her. The more alkaloids the male has ingested, the better he seems to smell, and the more clearly he seems to signal: I am fit, I am able, I have a big nuptial gift
The male's chemical bouquet contains an inhibitor against flight and a glue to keep the dust on the female's antennae. Females courted in the air land. The hairpenciling continues. A female says yes by closing her wings and giving the male access to her abdomen. He cuddles closer and palpates he antennae as they join.
She says no by fluttering her wings. Now the male tries dropping on her repeatedly and forcing her back into the air, where he will repeat the entire process. These second attempts may or may not be successful.
Once their genitalia are locked, the male rises and carries the female in a postnuptial flight.They may be together for as log as eight hours, and he prefers a more private place. ( In some species the female is larger and carries the male. Sometimes, after mating is finished, a female will fly off, dangling her partner, simply in the hope of dislodging him).
During copulation, the male passes on his spermatophore - the sperm and the nuptial gift - which includes the alkaloids collected earlier from plants. Possibly she uses these chemicals to increase her toxicity of she may pass them on to her eggs, to help protect them.
The female Queen mates as many as fifteen times in her life. She'll produce and lay a number of egg batches fertilized by a number of males.
Let the male collect the alkaloids. The female has enough work to do.
Oh drat! I've run out of time and I haven't got to the chapter about why moths are not attracted to light. Well anyway the sun is coming back out in Alabama tomorrow. I'll go count butterflies tomorrow and continue this report.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Very interesting, amemeba, but I'm stuck on the term "male queen." Are these San Franciscan moths?
I left my hairpencilllll
In San Franciscoooooooo ....
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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No, Ann. But he did a bug part in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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stuck on the term "male queen."
No weirder than male ladybug (or ladybird, if y'all are over there).
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Amemba:
Are you 'a member'?
Anyway, your information about butterflies was packed with fanciful observations. It is good to know butterflies score 2 on the SAT. I think we humans need to take a close look at the areas in which butterflies score so well. Do any humans miss items that some butterflies get correct?
The farm is still fluttering with a preponderance of butterflies. I think they're pretty much drunk by now on their favorite azaleas, which have never looked more beautiful and full.
Does anybody know whether blossoms, at least certain kinds of blossoms, refill their tanks of nectar?
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Thanks Faldage for explaining my use of the term "Queen male."
But my bad. Subliminally speaking it was a Freudian slip.
( In my case, a chic little chartreuse number, severely cut, but tastefully so, so as not to excite.)
Queen butterfly
( Danaus gilippus )
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Shoot, sjmaxq, I thought I knew why moths fly into flames until I read the omnigenus theories of your URLs. After a careful reading of each I came to believe that all of these ideas were game attempts at understanding this odd moth behavior but each came short of making a convincing case.
Including the theory in the fourth URL that I found most reasonable, i.e. that moths fly into bright lights because of the interplay of the optical characteristics of moth eyes and the wave lengths of visible light which causes the moth to see darkness at the immediate edge of any bright light.
So, simply, the moths fly to the darkness as per their genetic instruction and since this darkness is ambient for a short distance around the light source they fly directly towards what they perceive as the darkest dark that they can see, and so circle the apparent darkness in an never-ending circle.
What a waste.
Too wasteful. So I came up with my own explanation to make the "Ambient darkness" theory fit my understanding of the processes of evolution and as such sit well in my brain.
Here it is ...
Back before bats gave birth to butterflies by driving a few moth species out from their nocturnal habits of a hundred million years and into the brave new world of daylight where birds and wasps found them tasty, but at least in the daytime there were no damn bats.
But today out of 165,000 species of the order Lepidoptera (more than all the species of mammals, birds, reptiles. and fishes combined) only 18,000 are butterflies and the rest are moths. See that stand of woods out your window? Most parts of those woodlands that are being eaten at this moment are being eaten by moths. Pretty good accomplishment for creatures so stupid that they fly into burning flames, huh?.
Still these hairy, fat, not-butterflies ( "hairy" because their hairs interfere with the honeing radar of bats.) do fly into bright lights and circle about, so why didn't they evolve a better response to the occasion of bright lights? Mmmmmm?
Like a bat out of hell it hit me...Ah Ha, Eureka, Raise the Flag! I got it!
Forest fires! Death fires; that can easily wipe out an entire species of night flying moths...unless, that is, the soon-to-be-incenerated moths fly straight towards the raging fire and then circle the flames and ride the rising hot thermals to safety while the fire passes harmlessly beneath.
A clear night holding a bottle of Jack Daniels while sitting around a popping hot campfire is my proof.
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Carpal Tunnel
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The report from Puerto Rico is that the butterfly population seems to be normal...no great changes in quantities.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Saturday... Sitting in a camping chair set in the middle of a dirt road next to a cornfield surrounded by deep woods, I sipped on a tall rechargeable drink and watched the pretty butterflies as they flittered about. On my left large numbers of small yellow butterflies supped on the small yellow flowers that grew on vines that wrapped around the brown but still standing stalks of corn-less corn. Their visits to the flowers were brief ; Slam, bam, thank you, Mam, but I was able to identify them as” little yellow sulphurs” ariomma lisa ( the most common sulphur in the southeast) and noted that their bright coloration was identical with the color of the yellow flowers on which they fed. Now whose big idea was that, I wondered, the butterflies or the flowers? And I still wonder. After mixing another drink I turned my attention to my right where a single white butterfly was being annoyingly indecisive, and took a long time flittering about before finally landing on a deep red wildflower nearby. And then immediately disappeared. Huh? I almost dropped my drink. How could a white butterfly land on a dark red flower, and just disappear? This I had to see. Moving my chair to the bush must have disturbed the little creature because she sprang suddenly up into the air where she began again her indecisive coy-ed dance. While I waited for the little dear to settle down I studied the flowers that she had, thus far, found to her favor. The six crimson petals on each flower measured about an inch long, each curving to a point. In the center was the nectar pods, or the pollen pods, depending on your point of view. No wonder the white beauty found these flowers so attractive, there were a dozen individual compartments in the center of the flower in an area about the size of a dime, a pod poker’s dream. Maybe crime doesn’t pay but clean-living does, what good luck; as I studied the flower the butterfly returned to the flower that I was studying, and so I caught, first hand, her disappearing act. This is how it is done... In one motion the butterfly lands at the center of the flower and folds her wings tightly behind her back and slips between the red petals to the back of the flower and then turns around and waits. After a short while she slips back to the face of the flower, but because her wings are tightly folded she offers only the slightest of profiles to any viewer who happens to be directly ahead, and for a viewer further away, she is invisible and so can turn clockwise while eating at her leisure without being eaten. By turning my head to the side I could look at her underside as her wings were folded straight up. She was a beautiful “blue”, probably an Eastern Tailed -blue of the subfamily Polyommatinae, the butterflies that so infatuated Vladimir Nabokov to the extent that he forgot Lolita and spent a large measure of the rest of his life chasing after blue butterflies in North and South America. And now I too understand. If you, like me, had watched the seductive up and down motions of her hind wings, and seen first hand the sensual stroking of her antenna clubs as she circled around while supping sweet nectar, you would be seduced too.
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That was a lovely, evocative account, meme. Thank you.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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The world is truly a place full of wonder. If I was offered all knowledge I pray I would have the courage to turn it down. The act of discovery is just too much fun.
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Carpal Tunnel
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"...you would be seduced too.
You just *did me.
Gracias.
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member
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member
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Brings to mind a time some years back when, at dusk, I saw
little white butterflies sort of swarming around some white periwinkles. In the fading light it was very beautiful and sometimes hard to tell the butterflies from the flowers, as they would light and be still a moment, so it would look as if some of the flowers were taking flight.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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as if some of the flowers were taking flight.
lovely image Jomama
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OP
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It is a lovely image. Mythically, perhaps that's how the butterfly came into being--by inspiration of 'something there is' that wanted to take flowers into flight.
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