Flos apidanus - Plain Plush Blue

Hairstreaks are amazing to watch, far more interesting and alive than any other butterfly.

They are called hairstreaks because of the two false antennae at the rear end. As if this wasn’t enough to confuse a passing avian into biting the wrong end, the butterfly evolved a way of moving the antennae for another level of realism. And there’s more; evolution also slapped a couple of eyes on the rear end for good measure. For these reasons, you see so many of these butterflies with their rear ends missing, but they are still alive and ready to reproduce.

Hairstreaks really show what evolution is all about. Millions of random mistakes, genetic errors resulting in deformities large and small. Just occasionally, the error gives the butterfly a life advantage over its competitors, and so that genetic mistake is passed on to the next generation, and the error becomes a part of the gene pool.

The complexity of the evolved colors, shapes, patterns and forms are astounding, and understandable how they can take many tens of millions of years to form, and that is with a new generation every year. Man can only reproduce a new generation after 20 years. So at around one million years old, we are actually only about 50,000 generations into our species. We are infants in comparison to butterflies, that have been around for at least 50million years.

Location is Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. Scrubland, mimosa bush.