Saturday 23 November 2019

This Beautiful Butterfly,

can perform a neat trick,


wings open it looks so nice, photograph peellden/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) but when the butterfly closes its wings,

it can almost disappear into the foliage, it is a species of nymphalid butterfly found in India and Japan, is known as the orange oakleaf or dead leaf butterfly, (Kallima inachus), photograph Noumenon/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

what makes kalima inachus, different from other leaf mimicking butterflies is that it has two distinct forms, depending on the season, during the dry season, when tropical butterflies tend to be less active, its outer wing patterns are almost perfectly uniform, which offers it plenty of protection from predators, as long as it remains perfectly still, why or how this intriguing butterfly changes between its two forms – dry season and wet season – is still a mystery, but scientists believe that it’s simply an advanced form of predator evasion, what is even more baffling is the different in size between the two forms, with the wet season one being slightly smaller, what an amazing creature.


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