Hey, it is Halloween today!...

So, lets continue with the horror stories of butterflies ending their short lives in dramatic circumstancies...
How about butterflies lured to electrical lights and fried alive by the heat of the lights and/or stuck behind the wire screens...The one on the left is likely a male Evening Brown (Melanitis leda), here the underside is seen, in it's wet-season form, I believe. The one on the right side is probably the same species and also a male but seen from the top side, therefore darker.

(The above picture has been taken in the Botanical Garden in Harvey Bay, last August.)

Or alternatively, imagine yourself (if you can) being fed to a young rainbow bee-eater...

Gulp...

(I spotted these butterfly-eating rainbow bee-eaters locally, at Ginnindera Creek in Canberra.)
The butterfly is most likely Vanessa kerhawi (Australian Painted Lady).

And here (below) is one more photo from Cape Hillsborough of unlucky entanglement in the spider web, yet different species of butterfly; nature is so often both beautifull and cruel at the same time...
As for the name of the butterfly it seems to be one of the Bush-browns, perhaps Dingy Bush-brown (Mycalesis perseus)? But what surprises me is that it is a wet-season form even although this photo was taken at the end of July...I am not too sure how to explain it, could it be that the poor butterfly was hanging there for several months?

Butterflies don't pay taxes, but...

It is this time of year again, the deadline for submitting one's tax return is approaching, which reminds me the old saying along the lines: "There are only two things certain in our lives, these are a.) having to pay taxes and b.) our death..."

Butterflies do not pay taxes, but they are certainly not spared from death. When visiting Cape Hillsborough during my last holiday, on a single day (29th of July 2010)  I photographed several various ways in which death can meet a single species of butterfly, Evening Brown (Melanitis leda)...

Be it by drowning, getting stuck in the spider web or being consumed by other insects, perhaps by green ants (as shown in the photo above), in one form or another, death  will certainly come...

Inspecting the crime scene...

The remnant of the pupa:

Please note that instead of the long crack along the axis (which would be typical if the moth has emerged normally) there is a top part of pupa missing, presumably the culprit wasp emerges from the top part and not sideways like the moth would...

parasitoid wasp?

About 1 month ago or so I have found a small pupa hanging on a silk thread in my garden under the rim of a plastic gardening pot. I assumed it belongs to some lepidoptera...

But what has emerged from it today was not a butterfly nor a moth, to my great surprise....
It is a wasp (Ichneumon wasp), I assume it simply/gradually ate all the pupa except it's "shell" and then emerged as an adult ("hiperactive") wasp! (Call Crime Scene Investigators now...)