Large geometrid moth, Venus Drive.
The butterflies and moths encountered in woods and waysides, floating before floral nectaries and wheeling below the canopy, are survivors – the fortunate, or perhaps fitter, few who failed to fall prey to tree shrews, cuckoos, tailorbirds, agamids, geckos, tree frogs, assassin bugs, carabid beetles, potter wasps and huntsman spiders. Many of their siblings succumbed to fate long before they hatched, the victims of mites, spiders, ants, thrips and earwigs, or the hosts of minute wasps that follow the odour of freshly laid eggs and inject their own ova into the capsules. The grubs, if they are lucky enough to elude their own parasitoids, emerge into a womb of plenty and munch through a body on its last, lumbering legs.
Common snow flat, Venus Drive.
Tachinid larvae and fungal spores also take their toll on young lepidopterans, which suffer a dismal toll to their numbers despite wieding defensive strategies that include cryptic profiles, urticating hairs, species rings of toxicity, and the ability to recruit knights in formicid armour. No protection is foolproof; cuckoos and bugs with long rostrums can pierce and process the bristling layers of moth caterpillars, predators led by their noises are immune to visual disguise and warning colours, and what is mortal to avian hunters may be meat for spineless appetites. Pecked at, ripped apart, stabbed alive and eaten from the inside out, the flightless instars of a scaly order are usually kept at bay by an alliance of foes, lest they outpace the natural of things to devour our parks, invade a garden city and flit through the cloud that keeps the world of small wonders from infecting those in a perpetual pursuit of business as usual.
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