November 8, 2005
Butterfly Kisses
I frequently hang out on the NaturePhotographers.Net forum, especially in the image critique area. It's a friendly place to view and post nature photography and get some great constructive feedback. Occassionally, you might even learn something, like I did today!
A fellow photographer had posted a macro shot of an American Lady butterfly and it reminded me of some photos I had taken earlier in the year at Death Valley, which had had a fabulous wildflower season. The butterflies were everywhere and I swear, there were like 200 stuck to our jeep's front grill by the time we came home, which was a shame. At one point, we had stopped the car and as I got out of the car, I noticed a broken butterfly on the road. It was still alive, but clearly not fairing well. I let it crawl onto my finger and as it didn't seem very distressed, I thought I'd put some extension tubes on my 20D and try to take a couple of pictures.
I've never had the opportunity to look so closely at a butterfly. When I looked at the pictures later, I realized how fuzzy these creatures are, and that my butterfly seemed to keep sticking its tongue out at me. When I saw on the forum that someone else had taken a shot of this behavior I asked about it! According to the butterfly photographer, it's called a proboscis, and it acts rather like a drinking straw. The butterfly uses it to reach into flowers for nectar, rolling it up when they're not eating. According to wikipedia, a proboscis (from Greek pro "before" and baskein "to feed") is an long appendage from the head of an animal. The most common usage is to refer to the tubular feeding and sucking organ of insects, worms and mollusks, but an elephant's trunk is also called a proboscis. The term is occassionally used for primate organs as well - the Proboscis Monkey is named for its enormous nose.
The proboscis of a butterfly is very versatile, allowing it to extract sweet nectar from any type of flower, regardless of its shape. During its larval stage as a caterpillar, it can munch away, but when it becomes a butterfly, it loses the ability to chew and must drink its meals instead. It is believed that the Sphinx moth have the longest of the insect proboscises, with lengths up to 14 inches! They are even sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds!
Here are some more close-ups, where you can see the proboscis, partially curled up. You can click on individual shots to see a larger version.
Posted by sorsha at 1:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack