Flutter By

Butterfly in London Zoo's Butterfly Paradise

It's a butterfly! And a very pretty one too. I like going in butterfly houses and admiring the pretties (and also, they're really warm and cosy, which is nice when there's snow on the ground outside). Admittedly I am less keen when they flap in my face, but as long as they're hanging off leaves looking pretty/eating rotten fruit, I'm happy.

While we were in the butterfly house, my boyfriend told me that some butterflies drink blood. Thinking he had gone briefly mad, I laughed and said he was confusing them with bats. But no! I was entirely wrong. It was there in black-and-white on one of the signs in the exibit. I googled it, and found this picture of butterflies drinking blood from a sock. Yes, you heard me. A sock. If you didn't know already, it turns out that butterflies are one of the sock's few natural predators. Also, here is a National Geographic article about vampire moths. Apparently in Slavic folklore, vampires were able to take the form of butterflies.

This whole discovery has rather changed the way I view these insects. I used to think they were nice decorative creatures to have around the place, sort of like nature's bunting. Now I know they are opportunistic greedy blood-sucking horrors. The butterfly house will never be the same again.

Raspberry Ripple Flower, and a Fact of the Day

The pattern of these petals is stunning and reminds me of an interesting thing, which I hereby present to you as my Fact Of The Day: some flowers have markings on their petals which we can't see, because they reflect UV light that our eyes don't pick up. Certain pollinating insects can see into different spectral bands than humans, and the flowers' colouring reflects this; sometimes what appears to us as a fairy unexciting bloom looks quite different if you use a camera which is able to record ultra violet or infra red light. There's a really nice website here which has photos of different flowers shown as they normally appear to us, and coloured to show the UV patterns and fluorescence which we can't see. Some of my favourite examples include this picture, which I think is featured in Richard Dawkins' book The Greatest Show On Earth, this very jazzy example, and this rather dramatic bloom, which clearly shows the "bulls-eye" pattern that a lot of UV-patterned flowers exhibit.
So next time you see a rather plain and insipid bouquet, just remember: perhaps it's your eyes and not the flowers which are at fault...