15 February 2008

Buttermoths anonymous

Alistair Rennie's punningly titled beautiful winged creatures had me smiling healthily but oh-so-quickly thinking correcting thoughts. Look at those club antennae, that bright colour, the way their wings are held open, and . . .

But Hah!

I can't cry that I wrote Lolita
So thank you, Alistair, for liberating my ignorant admiration, my lack of knowledge for proper identification. Now I can post a portrait of a beauty I cannot put a name to.

For lack of an expert, my name is '?'

"How can they say they know me?"

3 comments:

budak said...

his pair look more like blue butterflies (Lycaenidae), whose caterpillars practice subterfuge among ants. The Pierce lab has done much work on Australian blues:
http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/pierce/Research/main/research.html

http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/pierce/publicaciones/Jalmenus.html

Anonymous said...

Actually, I found a match for my ones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazarine_Blue

So, yup, they're butterflies.

The question is, do we allow the pun to stand at the expense of scientific accuracy? I feel sure that, either way, there's a law being broken.

Those caterpillar/ant relations are fascinating, budak. Thanks for pointing it out.

anna tambour said...

Horrors! Don't remove your pun, Alistair. It lightened my life and who knows how many others. And thanks to Budak, it led to the blessed state of Enlightenment. "Scientific accuracy" is expended every day, and these days, faster than our carbon reserves. I was only thinking this morning of the irony of the Australian Catholic University sponsoring one of Australia's premier science prizes, and what a prize: The Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Ethics Research. But let's leave those miracle makers and go to "clean coal" CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage). Is it a stalling tactic or science? If current funding changes are signs of where the scientific basis lies, "science" means smokescreens.
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/
Or for fun, consider my favourite (multiple) law-breaker, from New Scientist itself: "Eating chocolate may halve the risk of dying" "http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn8780-eating-chocolate-may-halve-risk-of-dying.html