Tasting butterflies?

[Chris J. Durden]

I usually smell the butterflies I catch. Frequently there are androconial 
odors that can be recognized, remembered and compared between close 
species, and on occasion recognized before the insect is observed.
    There is also the blood odor of a pinched specimen. This can be quite 
strikingly different between closely related species such as *Speyeria 
zerene* s.l. and *Speyeria coronis* s.l. Even more remarkable is the blood 
smell of morphological intermediates between these two, suggesting that 
they may indeed be natural hybrids. Most of these observations were made in 
southern Montana.
    In Central and South America, different species of *Heliconius* have 
characteristic blood odors. This unfortunately is the limit of my chemical 
expertise.
..............Chris Durden

At 02:06 PM 7/26/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>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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