Who I was, covered up in leaves

[sovay]

My mother heard on the radio this afternoon that butterfly fossils prove that the proboscis evolved a full geologic period before flowering plants did.

Me: "So what were they eating with them?"

My mother: "Aha!"

(She's suspecting carrion.)

Comments

[muccamukk]

I feel like I saw the carrion-eating butterflies in at least one episode of Doctor Who. I also like the nosehair tool.

possibly not what you wanted to know about my reading comprehension at this hour

[yhlee]

...I misread "Aha!" as "anal" and had this horrifying thought of butterfly, um, sex...

[nineweaving]

Whoa!

Nine

[asakiyume]

I heard this story! Their theory involved nectar that was lying about on conifers, but I prefer scary carnivorous butterflies. Though does eating carrion count as carnivorous?

[thistleingrey]

Fungi also/instead, perhaps?

[thomasyan]

Unrelated, but this reminds me that I recently learned that hummingbirds drink in an unusual way -- item 59 on this list

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/the-science-facts-that-blew-our-minds-in-2017/549122/

(Actually, I'm still a bit confused because I didn't entirely understand the linked article, but I can still tell that it's pretty neat.)

[cmcmck]

Now that's a fascinating question! Something truly ancient like horsetails, perhaps?

Thanks for a cool link

[redbird]

So I did a little googling. The authors of the paper think those proboscises evolved originally to drink water, and some butterflies and moths then started using them partly to get nectar from horsetails. There's also an offhand reference (as to something that people in the field already know) to "increased herbivory" of insects, with specifics about leaf-eating.

Meanwhile, Scientific American also has people saying "maybe not" about significant ancient diversification of Lepidoptera, but it's not clear whether they mean "no, you're trying to get too much from a few fossil scales" or "yes, these three lineages go back to the end of the Triassic, but that doesn't mean there were lots of moths and butterflies flying around the early Jurassic landscape."

[thisbluespirit]

Bloodthirsty butterflies definitely sounds familiar (in a SF way, I mean, not in rl). HMm. (I didn't think it was DW, though, but it could have been.)

[tb]

From an on-line guide: "Butterflies can eat anything that can dissolve in water." Anything. So not so much with solid carrion but...

This guide might be "helpful", specifically number 3, the Northern Pearly-eye (and relatives). The little brown woodland butterflies of subfamily Satyrinae all share those habits. Perhaps the carnality that mythological satyrs are associated with is not quite on the mark.

(I was an entomologist in a previous life and ended up not choosing the Little Wood Satyr as my field-study species mostly because it was too cryptic and its food sources too scattered.)

[dhampyresa]

FLESH EATING BUTTERFLIES!