Blood sucking butterfly

[horace2264]

Sharing this youtube video (original source: Animal Planet) of a blood sucking butterfly found in Spain. It seems that the butterfly is "puddling" on the open wounds of dead animals.

Youtube url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthhQYg02Cc

[Grass Demon]

This programme certainly screwed up the innocent image of butterflies. Firstly dead animals have no more blood, it's just body fluid. We know all along that butterflies feed on carrion.

[EarlyStages]

Please forgive my opining, but "innocent" is an arbitrary, human emotion that has no real meaning or validity in the natural world. Surely there is little if any difference between rotting fruit, feces, body fluids (urine, blood, etc.), and the like to an adult nymphalid. The notion that blood-feeding somehow tarnishes a butterfly's "image" seems rather pretentious, especially in light of recent discoveries that certain male moths (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calyptra_(moth)) have evolved such a habit*. BTW, the YouTube clip features Charaxes jasius, the Two-tailed Pasha or Mariposa del Madroño in Spanish, the northernmost member of the subfamily.

Keith

* http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/081027-vampire-moth-evolution-halloween-missions.html

[atronox]

there are many lepidopterans that feed on blood but there is only one moth that actively seeks and punctures the flesh of its victims in the manner of mozzies and that is Calpe eustrigata.:grin2:

[teotp]

A blood sucking butterfly found in Spain. It seems that the butterfly is "puddling" on the open wounds of dead animals.

Food resources of adult butterflies can be categorised under four types: Water, sugars, salts and amino acids (Scoble, 2002), and without exception, blood is also under these categories.

The studies on morphology of proboscis in relation to food preferences of adult Lepidoptera were pioneered by Dr. Harald W. Krenn from University of Vienna, Austria. In his numerous publications, he indicated that food preferences of adult butterflies (and moths) are largely depend on the morphology of their mouthparts, the structures of proboscis revealed many differences in length, tip-region length, wall composition, numbers and shape of proboscis sensilla, technique and movement of proboscis...etc.

The adaptations of proboscis structures and movement to various food sources (e.g. nectar feeding and flower-handling behaviour, pollen feeding, fruit and skin piercing technique, eye-frequenting and tear feeding...etc) were described in his recent review paper appeared in Annual Review of Entomology. He pointed out that a considerable number of butterflies of the family Nymphalidae, and certain species of the Riodinidae, Lycaenidae, and some moths of the Noctuidae have never been observed to visit flowers, these non-flower-visiting butterflies feed on fruits, honeydew or decaying substances. These butterflies have a shorter proboscis than their nectar-feeding relatives. The tip region is equipped with long, numerous, and densely ordered sensilla styloconica, which form a flat brush that functions as a structure for accumulation of fluid. The brush-shaped tip region is interpreted to be an adaptation to feed on wet surfaces, and perform a sweeping technique along with dabbing movements to ingest fluid from wet surfaces of various kinds (Krenn, 2010). And Charaxes species are greedy to many types of food including rotten fruits, animal excreta and remains, and feeding of blood is not surprised.

Teo T P

[EarlyStages]

FYI (http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakrishnan_valappil/6024089110/)

Keith