July 7th, 2015: Not a Snake

Not a snake, looks like one but it’s just a Chrysalis mimicking the appearance of a snake.
The Pupa inside starts twerking when it detects something is out there, which makes the Chrysalis wiggle adding to the snake illusion.



If the ruse is successful, after 13 days of fooling predators, a Dynastor darius butterfly emerges.



In case you hadn’t noticed, bugs be sneaky. ;)

great pic

Beautiful plumage.

The poor thing spends 9 days in the egg stage, 40 days in five larval stages, and 13 days as a pupa, before emerging as a butterfly. After all that, it's finally time to party hearty, right? Nope. It won't live very long because as near as they can figure it doesn't have any way to eat. After all that trouble getting gussied up it must have some way of whispering sweet nothings though, because it must get laid or they would have died out.

It boggles my small, smooth brain to try to comprehend the sequence and scale of *random mutations* that produced a reproductive advantage of sufficient success to create this result.

How does the butterfly even "know" about snakes anyhow?

How does the butterfly even "know" about snakes anyhow?

Wikipedia. ;)

The butterfly doesn't know about snakes; the predators who might otherwise have eaten the butterfly's ancestors knew about snakes.

All the chrysalises that looked like hornswogglers and rattletats and humperdinks and ficklers and snozzberries got eaten, so all that was left were the chrysalises that looked like snakes.