Blue Morpho Butterflies!

The Blue Morpho Butterfly is a species of neotropical butterfly that has brilliant blue wings (the females are are not as brilliantly colored as the males and have a brown edge with white spots surrounding the iridescent blue area). The undersides (visible when the butterfly is resting) are brown with bronze-colored eyespots. The Blue Morpho has a wingspan of about 6 inches (15 cm).

Butterflies live to reproduce, they reproduce and die shortly after laying eggs. Male butterflies release chemicals called pheromones in their wings and attract as many females as possible. The female's eggs are fertilized, they lay them in a safe place and flies off. The eggs will hatch after about nine days. The young caterpillars face many dangers and have no one to protect them. Many caterpillars die, either because of their cannibal siblings or because of their natural predators.

In order to survive they have had to go through several changes. The underside of their wings is the same color as foliage in order to camouflage when they crypsis (fold wings when resting so the only the underside shows). Even though, it has been forced to change its life style in order to protect itself. It has learned to fly in a very unusual way so that the blue side of their wings shows only once in a while and very quickly. A very interesting fact about how they protect themselves is that they flash the bright blue side of their wings in the face of baby jaguars and blind them.
The blue morpho’s diet changes throughout each stage of its lifecycle. As a caterpillar, it chews leaves of many varieties, but prefers to dine on plants in the pea family. When it becomes a butterfly it can no longer chew, but drinks its food instead. Adults use a long, protruding mouth part called a proboscis as a drinking straw to sip the juice of rotting fruit, the fluids of decomposing animals, tree sap, fungi and wet mud. Blue morphos taste fruit with sensors on their legs, and they "taste-smell" the air with their antennae, which serve as a combined tongue and nose.

But their worst nightmare are humans like you and me who venture into their peaceful habitat to catch them and sell them in glass cases to people who will hang them on a wall and won't even care when it falls and breaks.

Friday, April 8, 2011