Winged beauty

Wing patterns in butterflies have always amazed me.I consider myself really lucky to have  friends who share my interest in rearing butterflies.Rearing butterflies has given me an opportunity to observe them from close quarters. Butterflies are excellent indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem health. They react to problems in the environment such as habitat loss or degradation, pollution, invasive species, and climate change much more rapidly than longer-lived organisms, and therefore provide a sort of early warning system.

 I would like to share my fascinating experience of rearing a Common Baron (Euthalia aconthea )

Baron caterpillars evolved their elaborate shapes and colors for that single purpose: hiding from predators. Native to India and Southeast Asia, barons often feed on the leaves of mango trees.

This caterpillar was found on an Anacardium occidentale leaf.

My neighbor found a similar caterpillar and gave it to me as she knew about my interest in rearing butterflies.We fed it with mango leaves . After a few days it turns into a Pupa leaving out its hairy camouflage attire.

The outer covering becomes transparent when the butterfly is about to emerge. The wing patterns and the eyes are seen clearly.

 The butterfly emerges and hangs on to its pupal case. It takes this position to dry its wings.

A newly emerged butterfly needs to spend some time inflating its wings with blood and letting them dry, during which time it is extremely vulnerable to predators. Some butterflies’ wings may take up to three hours to dry while others take about one hour. Most butterflies and moths will excrete excess dye after hatching. This fluid may be white, red, orange, or in rare cases, blue.

Butterfly proboscises are slender, tubular feeding structures. Culminating in a sharp, beak-like tip, the proboscis works like a straw through which a butterfly drinks its food. When a butterfly finds food, it first unfurls its mouth parts and then zips them together to form a channel. The proboscis is particularly well adapted for reaching into flowers for nectar and for piercing fruit with its sharp tip. When a butterfly is not feeding, it keeps its proboscis curled between its palpi (which are a pair of organs located on the front of an adult butterfly face).

In butterflies, by contrast, the same spot or stripe occurs in exactly the same location in all individuals of a species. More importantly, a given spot or stripe can be traced from species to species within a genus and often from genus to genus within a family.

Structure of wing patterns:The main organizing principle of butterfly color patterns is the symmetry system.Based on the new sequence, scientists found that different species copy each other’s wing patterns by exchanging genes, a process thought to be very rare, especially in animals.To know more on this click on the link below

http://smithsonianscience.org/2012/05/heliconius-butterfly-genome-explains-wing-pattern-diversity/

http://smithsonianscience.org/2011/08/an-eye-gene-colors-butterfly-wings-red/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/08/16/supergene-allows-butterflies-to-copy-the-wings-of-their-toxic-neighbors/

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v108/n6/full/hdy20126a.html

http://dev.biologists.org/content/116/1/103.full.pdf

http://biology.duke.edu/nijhout/images/PatternElements.pdf

Photo credits : Clicks by Poornima, Kannan and Anirudh.

Spider Wasps

On a recent nature trail we noticed a wasp struggling to carry a wolf spider(Lycosidae).

May be it needed rest so it made the spider lean against a plant and disappeared for some time .The spider remained in that position till the Wasp came back to take it .We realized that the spider had been paralyzed by the wasp .

Spider wasps are long-legged, solitary wasps that use a single spider as a host for feeding their larvae. They paralyze the spider with a venomous stinger. Once paralyzed, the spider is dragged to its nest. A single egg is laid on the abdomen of the spider, and the nest is closed. As the larva feeds on its host, it saves the vital organs, such as the heart and central nervous system, for last. By waiting until the final stage , it ensures that the spider will not decompose before the larva has fully developed.

Pompilidae gets its common name, “Spider Wasps,” from the their notable behavior of hunting and killing spiders, often larger than themselves, as food for their larvae. They provide each of their larvae with a single prey , which must be large enough to serve as its food source throughout its development. It has been shown that there is a direct correlation between the wasp length and the weight of the host spider.