Sunday, May 26, 2013

[jules' pics] Butterfly

Denver has a Butterfly Pavilion. They ship farmed chrysalises from foreign, and when they hatch, the butterflies are released into the greenhouse, where they die. I suppose this is probably how most butterfly pavilions operate, but it did seem a bit like the greenhouse was the pet that was being fed by butterflies.
butterfly
butterfly
This one was huge. Bigger than a, um... tarantula?
butterfly
tarantula
eeep! The band of big furry spiders at the Butterfly Pavilion seem to thrive rather better than the butterflies. The zookeeper said this one was about 15 years old...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 5/26/2013 10:30:00 AM

5 comments:

Oale said...

technically, the last lepidoteran is a moth, likely Attacus atlas or relative (my name for this is the snakehead giant silk moth.) First one looks like some tropical Nymphalid (seek f.e. Limenitinae) and the name of the middle could be the common green birdwing but not sure. (indonesia, ceylon)

Oale said...

sorry, not limenitinae but limenitidinae (bad error!), some subspecies of Parthenos sylvia, clipper. All might be in Thailand garden section.

Oale said...

sorry again, the birdwing does not live in Thailand, but Papua New Guinea.

andrewt said...

The middle butterfly is Australian - a Cairns Birdwing Ornithoptera euphorion - our largest.

jules said...

I thought the 3rd might be a moth, as we have similar looking ones in Japan...