Peter this is a wonderful video - so many rare and beautiful species, and shot in exquisite detail and technical brilliance! Thnak you for sharing your butterfly moments with us!
Visited south eastern Bolivia in 2018..no butterflies there just magnificent scenery & flamingos. You got some wobderful footage of Prepona praeneste buckleyana..wow..one of my favourites👍👍
Fascinating stuff. Thank you Pedro. Those feeding butterflies all appear to be males. Are they? Males emerge a week or so before the females in most larger species such as Agrias, Prepona Charaxes Apatura ( Doxocopa ) etc as they need to feed up on certain foodstuffs to become sexually mature otherwise they would be unable to mate when the females appear.. I wonder what "attractant" was used ... possibly urine, salt or fermenting fruit juices.. Forty years ago I raised Prepona here in the UK on Avocado plants grown from the large seeds inside the fruit. The larvae are remarkably well behaved and never stray off the plants. Therefore easy to raise from the egg/ova. Here in the UK we have few butterflies that feed on tree sap and other less appealing substances such as animal droppings. My Prepona demophon fully grown larvae have a remarkable defence mechanism which I discovered by chance when I bumped into the large plant pot the Avocado plants were growing in. These larvae then hunched up their first few segments in such a way that some of the features became arranged to resemble the head of a Snake complete with fangs! Then I realised what the various apparently random features along the anterior part of their bodies were for. . Amazing when I first saw that by chance disturbance reaction. That "Snake Head" would scare away any predatory bird who would otherwise eat the tasty larva. An ex-pat living in Brasil sent me the seeds of an Agrias foodplant which I grew here in the UK. Later I discovered that foodplant was in fact Erythroxylum novagrantense. The plant used to extract the drug cocaine... although it was later I learned about that...you need a UK licence to grow that stuff... :-).. I suspect the alkaloids from that plant goes some way to make these Agrias larvae less attractive to would be predators. Prepona, Agrias, Charaxes, Doxocopa Apatura and their close relatives are my favourite butterfly species. I took numerous still images of those larvae but I could never capture that "Snake Head" pose. They got used to the deliberate disturbances in time and did not react. Over the years I have corresponded with others worldwide who share my interest in these fascinating creatures. One invited me to his farm in Peru with the assurance that we would be alright, armed guides would protect us from the bandits and robbers who also inhabit those forests where the butterflies appear... :-)
Thanks for your comment MG John. Yes they are all males, and they are allways atracted to smelly stuff as animal droppings/shit-especially from carnivores incl. humans, rotten fish/meat, urin etc. Females prefer rotten/fermentated fruits but are much harder to attract. I have never seen Agrias females come to my bait. Agrias are tree top/ canopy living butterflies and prefer bait in high hanging traps. Especially males can be lured to bait on the ground. Females seems to prefer rotten fruits in high hanging traps. I saw my first wild Agrias in Ecuador over fourty years ago, and seen Agrias(now also Prepona) on all my 30 trips to the Andes/Amazon. Different species, different sexes, different locations/altitud all have different baiting method. All experienced people baiting have their own recipe, and use what they find more practical in the field. I do not found rotten fruits very usefull in Bolivia, used tonnes of it and gave it up. I found garbage/trash dumps, washing powder and small pieces of white paper with saliva on bigger leaves(for skippers) more usefull. This winter I tried out ethylen clycol drops on various places, It worked but not very good. Yes Agrias larvae feed on WILD coca plants, the domesticated coca plants are different and I never heard of agrias larvae found on these plants, or usefull for breeding. Breeding Agrias is rare and must be difficult. I Know a peruvian guy who actually succeed in extracting and eeg from a old female amydon boliviensis and got one larvae, and later pupae and butterfly, feeding on wild coca. I do not know much about breeding preponas, but seems easier than agrias, surprised to hear that they can feed on avocado, but how do get the female to lay eegs?. In Denmark I attracted female Apatura Iris with a baby shit diaper, and succesfull raised 27 larvea on a "bonsai" Salix caprea. The problem was to get her laying eegs, you probably know how to. Peter
Did I dream of a butterfly ？ Did a butterfly have my dream ？ You seeing the butterfly which dances wildly may be a butterfly ！ 🍎 From effulgent Tokyo in profound Japan Which national are you watching this video ？
I thought most butterflies feast on nectar and rotting fruit. Why would they lick dry rocks? Do they need salt? I haven't seen a single video yet of one tasting something other than rocks, water, or mud.
Robert Carpenter 1 year ago I asked ... what are they after? Salt? Sugar? Minerals? Something is going on here more than just water. Does anyone know? Could it be alcohol? And what is the recycling? In one end out the other ... Looks like they are after some dilute trace item.
Butterflies need nutrients and minerals to fly and reproduce, and many of these don't exist in the sweet liquids produced by flowers. Some butterflies also eat fruit. Some of these butterflies pierce the fruit's skin and drain the juices from inside. Others drink the juices from the surface of rotting fruit. Butterflies that prefer to drink from fresh fruit sometimes have a pointed proboscis, making it easier to puncture the fruit's skin. Getting enough minerals and salt requires other food sources, including urine, dung, dead animals and standing water. This is why you'll often see many butterflies drinking from very shallow, still water. This water has absorbed minerals from the soil underneath it, and the butterflies need these minerals to supplement their diet. This behavior is called puddling. If there's no water around, a butterfly may regurgitate or urinate into the soil and then drink in the hope of retrieving minerals. All of these behaviors lead up to the main purpose of a butterfly's life - reproduction.
Thanks for the great answer Pedro. Why do I never see this behavior in Texas? Occasionally I see a swarm of Sulfurs on wet mud. I just thought they were after water. And they are never accompanied by the hymenoptera, coleoptera, and diptera seen in your videos.
