So what this strange and possibly French electronic keyboard is doing in the butterfly house I don't know. It wasn't making any sound but it was a good enough perch. We know that is a blue morpho by the seven circle pattern on the underside of the wing. And where does the name morpho come from, anyway? Morpheus? So many questions.
The smooth, plain contours of a feeding dish contrast with wildly varied-but-symmetrical patterns of a butterfly. Hard to say what it makes me think of - an inkblot from stone to smooth paper, maybe a fractal pattern. The thorax resembles an elongated bumblebee. By the way, we learned that the butterflies like to eat old fruit. The staff splits bananas. mash them a bit and leave them until they are bug-yummy.
The top of a butterfly's wings has beautiful, colorful patterns but the undersides may be completely different. I don't know what species the insect on the right is (we can just tell that the one on the left is a blue morpho), but, like many butterflies and moths, it has evolved patters that make it look like something big and scary to potential predators. I may be reading too much into it but this one reminds me of a owl.
Someone liked the butterflies a lot. She thought it was hilarious when one landed on my head and another on her mother's jeans. It's hard to see in this version of the photo but she's even wearing her butterfly dress.
Our wonderful botanical garden has a butterfly house and research facility in the exurbs. It's far enough from home that we don't go often but Ellie likes it. They arranged a special event for the month by shipping in a thousand blue morphos from their station in Costa Rica.
These are tough little buggers to photograph. They won't sit still and pose, leading to this so-so picture in which you can't see the head or body. The iridescent color comes from an amazingly complex evolutionary process, which you could read up on at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpho_menelaus. More of this to come.
