A softball for this GOP challenge. This image comes care of the Victoria Advocate (TX paper) – with a poorly written article about butterflies. This image flop is pretty easy, but for extra points who can tell me what else is incorrect in the text?
Genius of the Press XVI
A softball for this GOP challenge. This image comes care of the Victoria Advocate (TX paper) – with a poorly written article about butterflies. This image flop is pretty easy, but for extra points who can tell me what else is incorrect in the text?
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Skepticism |
The butterfly names are incorrectly reveresed (the Queen is on the left, the Monarch is on the right). Are eyespots on the wings called ocelli?
p.s. I only just realized that I’d forgotten to update my feeder after your initial move to these new digs…here I thought you were being all quiet and not blogging – ha! Silly me; lots of catching up to do!
Welcome back!
The article you link to appears to have been written not by a typical journalist, but by the Education Director for a local zoo. Whether that makes it better or worse, I do not know.
Not only confused about which species is which, but also about which sex is attracted to which.
Yup, they are pretty obviously switched! You’re correct about the ocelli (which are actual light sensitive structure on the head and not just eye spots).
Additionally, the queen is actually “foul-tasting”, it does not mimic the monarch and both are aposematically colored. Not to mention the author also calls scales setae!
Ted is also correct… those females are probably trying to mimic the pipevine swallowtail, not attracting males.
What a mess.
I would have enjoyed seeing the writer go a bit more in depth on mimicry. It’s a bit lazy to merely write it off as just camouflage. Maybe explain the difference between Mullerian and Batesian. Mimicry may very well hold the key to correct ancestry placement among Neotropical butterflies.
The caption also implies that the Queen butterfly is not brightly colored. The writer needs to go back to Strunk and White.
Thanks for the nifty blog.