The curled tongued beauty

[Prajwal J Ullal]

ID: Dakhan Spotted flat

Its interesting how a normal society’s garden can have such an interesting variety of natural beauties. While exploring the garden section, usually have seen bark mantis several times, hence while searching for the evasive predator, stumbled upon some fast moving butterfly. After several minutes of chasing the beauty eventually, the weathered, yet hyper active butterfly, decided to take some brief rest on the periwinkle flower and on close observation, spotted it extend its curled up proboscis and then curl it back in. Later while I could manage to get pretty close and frame the beauty, realized that its proboscis had some pollen, not sure if it had sucked it out from this flower or from earlier flower that it might had visited. After a brief rest though it just flew off almost vanishing in the dark evening environment

EXIF:
Canon 80D
Canon 100mm macro
F/9
Shutterspeed 1/200
ISO 400
Handheld, External flash fired

Location: Thane

[Mrudul Godbole]

Interesting observation. Good details in the eye and head area. The pollens on the curled up proboscis can be clearly seen.

I just googled to know more about this behavior, it says - "During rest, the tube-like feeding structure of the butterfly (i.e., the proboscis, equated to a "tongue") remains coiled tightly against the head. However, when the butterfly moves to feed upon the nectar of a flower or something akin, the proboscis unfurls to extend downward into the flower's center."

Thanks for capturing and sharing this, got to learn something new. Look forward to more.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

The details in the head is captured well. Interesting behaviour captured. The chances of getting interesting behaviour while shooting macro is more compared to clicking large wildlife like tigers. Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi