Thursday, April 02, 2009

The Freddy Krueger of the butterfly world

Look at what we found on the front porch today! At first we thought it was a spider eating a butterfly. Then maybe some kind of mutated wasp. Is it butterflyish? Mothish? Waspish? I'm going to have to google this.

It has a wasp-like abdomen/body and thick, black spidery legs (think tarantula):



It has very large, ugly, mottled grey-blue wings:



The pictures don't give a good sense of it's size, but I'd say it's about the size of a 65 watt lightbulb. It is the creepiest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen creepy. Is it a hybrid? A mutant? An important link in the evolutionary chain? Even the lizards are staying away.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Probably you've figured this out by now, but that is a recently hatched moth...its abdomen is large and it's wings are small because the stuff in its abdomen has to be pumped out into its wings to expand them. You can even see the progression a bit in your pictures.

Stacey