Red Cracker Butterfly
by Robert Bales
Title
Red Cracker Butterfly
Artist
Robert Bales
Medium
Photograph - Photo
Description
One of the many butterflies at the Boise Zoo Butterflies Bloom Exhibit . It is a great place to view many different types of butterflies. You can walk through a greenhouse-like mesh enclosure with hundreds of butterflies. Zoo Boise Director Steve Burns says the butterflies come from Costa Rica. It gives the farmers in that area the opportunity to make money off of the forests rather than have to cut it down and ranch it so it's a great way for those folks to keep the rainforests intact and still make money for their families.
Butterfly cocoons of many different kinds are shipped Fed Ex from Costa Rica to Boise, where they hatch at the Zoo. There are up to 500 butterflies in the enclosure at any given time.
Cracker butterflies are a neotropical group of medium-sized brush-footed butterfly species of the genus Hamadryas. They acquired their common name due to the unusual way that males produce a "cracking" sound as part of their territorial displays. Cracker butterflies are all are fairly cryptic in their dorsal coloration, commonly covered in varying colored spots, mostly of which resemble bark. This genus of butterflies are commonly found throughout South America to Arizona, where at least nine species can be found in Costa Rica.
They spend most of the day perching on trees, boulders, and other such surfaces against which they are camouflaged. The speckled species of Hamadryas are often hard to distinguish, and most often these butterflies have to be examined as set specimens. There are no recent revisions, but a general account was published by D.W. Jenkins. Since cracker butterflies have camouflage, they are not poisonous and do not have a chemical defense. Male cracker butterflies are known for their ability to crack their wings, which is believed to either be for mating or to ward off rival males. They use trees as courting territories, as shown by experiments. They prefer tree bark that matches wing coloration, while presence of food, position of trees along flight routes, tree size, bark texture, and lichen cover are not associated with the frequency of perching on the trees.
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Uploaded
July 9th, 2016
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Viewed 1,500 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 03/28/2024 at 2:19 PM
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