Tasting butterflies?

Niklas Wahlberg Niklas.Wahlberg at zoologi.su.se
Thu Jul 26 08:06:11 EDT 2001


At 06:50 2001.07.26 -0400, Michael Gochfeld wrote:

>Som do Monarchs really taste worse than Viceroys? I'm sure someone must
>have rendered a formal opinion.
>
>Mike Gochfeld

Hi all,
     This reminds me of something that I've been thinking about for a long 
time. Are brightly coloured butterflies actually bad tasting? There have of 
course been some studies using birds as the innocent tasters, but such 
experiments require quite some infrastructure. What about the human sense 
of taste? Even if human taste is not quite representative of for example 
bird taste or even less representative of spider or predatory bug taste, 
wouldn't it give us some idea of the palatability of the butterflies? For 
instance, a colleague of mine recently told me that he tasted an adult 
Melitaea athalia (heath fritillary) just on the spur of the moment, and it 
apparently tasted really bitter and bad (in his own words "It is utterly 
and horribly bitter, like some relly BAD German liquor"). I've never 
gathered up the courage to taste my study subjects (the checkerspot 
butterflies), even though I assume they are bad tasting based on work done 
by Deane Bowers in the early '80s on a couple of species of Euphydryas. 
Perhaps I should start tasting?? Satyrines for instance are always assumed 
to be tasty to birds and they eat them with apparent relish in cages. But 
are they really tasty (or perhaps tasteless)? Has anybody on this list 
tasted any butterflies? If you have, I would be very interested to hear 
about your experience!

Cheers,
Niklas



Niklas Wahlberg
Department of Zoology
Stockholm University
S-106 91 Stockholm
SWEDEN

Phone: +46 8 164047
Fax:   +46 8 167715

http://www.zoologi.su.se/research/ihp/


 
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