Someone Has a Sense of Humor
I was going through some of my old insect photos. One of the time-consuming things is trying to identify what type of bug something is. I came across a photo of a butterfly, well, two photos of the same butterfly.
Eastern Tailed Blue Female on a clover, underside and top.
I’ve seen quite a few of these around, so I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to locate. The photo was taken in Maryland so I looked on a site about Maryland butterflies. There are plenty of pictures of most of the butterflies there and the site even has a couple of pictures of two of these mating. (The blue in the name refers to the color of the males.) On one of the mating photos, there is a conveniently placed flower petal. The caption says: “Censored mated pair.” It made me laugh.
fojap 
We have several species of Blue down here in South Africa. Not sure what these are, but I’ve managed shots of the Babault’s Blue and the African Grass Blue, which look similar, especially with that wing spot.
Nice captures.
After all that, I forgot to write down the name. It’s an Eastern Tailed Blue. There are about seven different species of blues in Maryland. Some are hard to tell apart, especially if you don’t have a clear photo. Wikipedia says that there are 5,000 species of Lycaenidae, or Gossamer Wing butterflies. Here’s a weird detail: “In some species, larvae are attended and protected by ants while feeding on the host plant, and the ants receive sugar-rich honeydew from them, throughout the larval life, and in some species during the pupal stage.”
I’ll go caption the photo.
A few seconds after taking that picture, I got a photo of another type of butterfly mating, but I was too lazy to look it up. Now I’m back in New York and I’ll have to see if our butterflies are different.
Go for it! We can swap photos!
🙂