Insectopia!

I have been overcome by a lethargy and inertia, as far as blogging goes, my excuse for the long hiatus.

But this beauty that I received from Mr Ramanan was just the stimulus I needed. Isn't it beautiful? Its called a Common lime butterfly, and you can see how it looks when basking, with open wings, here.

He found it outside his window! Its quite amazing what one sees outside the window, even in our cities.

Common lime butterfly - Photo by Mr Ramanan

Its called a Common lime because its host plant (where it lays eggs) are usually of the citrus family.

And then we saw this lovely Crimson Rose as it rested in my parents' home!

Crimson Rose
Crimson Rose, with the red body. The Mormon also mimics this butterfly, but its the red body which tells me that this is the real Crimson Rose, and is poisonous.

....And I saw these nice juicy caterpillars at the PWD tree park...the one where I saw the argiope, remember?

Its the Common or Lemon Emigrant caterpillars, all, in different stages - the initial little black one, then the all green and then the large geen one with a stripe!

I wonder where it migrates to or from? The butterfly looks a piece of lemon yellow paper! And its host is the Cassia species, and I did find them on a Cassia fistula sapling!

Do you see the large painted grasshopper on the plant below?
We saw these on the roadside, in Thoraipakkam on a Calatropis plant! There were dozens of them, all over the plant! They feed on this poisonous plant and become poisonous themselves, so the birds leave them alone.

The grasshopper and Crimson Rose are taken on my Sony Ericcson K 750i phone. while the caterpillars were shot with the Cybershot.

My camera and binoculars...(I salute you, inventors), what would I do without them?

Update - 25th Oct 2009

The common lime - at Adyar Poonga

The same common lime - they were all over the Poonga campus

A female common mormon butterfly - seen at my parents'. Check out the similarity to the Crimson Rose that it is imitating. But notice the differences - the black body, and the two white markings lower down!