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Enough with the dead butterflies
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoAre their wings not outstretched mid flap? I seem to recall that looking down on flying butterflies has them look an awful lot like I see in pictures, or even when they wiggle their wings perched, but that could be memory being fickle.
- nsxwolf 9y agoMy kids like to visit those butterfly gardens we have in some local parks. I never noticed anything, in real time, that conflicted with my mind's image of the standard "dead butterfly". I'll have to pay more attention next time.
- scott_s 9y agoMy understanding was that it's not that the pinned position is just outstretched, but also pulled forward. It's that forward position (I think) that they rarely ever take.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- watty 9y agoI guess we all have pet peeves but this one (while interesting) is a bit silly. Pillow designers are looking to create an attractive pillow that will sell - let's face it, a dead butterfly is more aesthetically pleasing than a living one due to the outstretched wings.
- jfk13 9y agoA dead butterfly may fit more "snugly" into the frame of a square pillow, but personally -- and aesthetics, after all, are rather subjective -- I would dispute that it is "more aesthetically pleasing" than a living one. (Disclaimer: this has long been a pet peeve of mine, too, as my wife could testify!)
- watty 9y agoYes, I didn't mean to speak for everyone - I'm sure many people prefer the living picture which has more emphasis on the body and less emphasis on the wings.
- 3131s 9y agoI definitely do. After seeing her drawings of a butterfly with correctly positioned wings, now I can't help but notice how bad the other more typical depiction looks.
- cannam 9y agoNot just the body, but also the layering or overlap of the wing segments which makes the sheathing mechanism apparent - that is very beautiful in itself (even if I don't know the right terms for these things). The typical image looks unnaturally stretched and two-dimensional in comparison. I found the article aesthetically as well as scientifically persuasive.
- amelius 9y agoJust look at it as a special projection method that has been applied to an image of a living butterfly :)
- nicky0 9y agoIs it really more aesthetically pleasing, or just more familiar?
- megamindbrian 9y agoMore pleasing because the underside of the wings aren't as colorful.
- detaro 9y agoYou don't necessarily see the underside of the wings in a natural pose.
- jfk13 9y agoAh yes - the undersides of butterfly wings are just SO dull, aren't they? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Hauhechel-Bläuling%2C_Polyommatus_icarus_Paarung_1.JPG/1920px-Hauhechel-Bläuling%2C_Polyommatus_icarus_Paarung_1.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ha...
- dragonwriter 9y agoAesthetics are subjective and often driven by familiarity; the two options you present aren't exclusive alternatives, the second explains one reason why the first would be true rather than providing an alternative to it.
- draw_down 9y agoYeah, I'm with you. They're meant to look pretty, anatomical/biological accuracy is not the point. I'm sure there are many, many such inaccuracies in illustrated animals one could find, if one cared to.
- pvnick 9y agoAgreed - who cares, other than the odd nut like the author. The wings are spread out further and show more of the wing. It looks nicer.
- ksenzee 9y agoIf you find the author to be an "odd nut" for caring about scientific accuracy, you may possibly be on the wrong website.
- sixothree 9y agoI find this attitude fairly disgusting.
- pvnick 9y agoA bit of a tangent - it seems to be common for folks to express disagreement with a certain sentiment by labeling the sentiment or the person expressing the sentiment as some adjective of repulsive, immoral, or gauche, rather than describing what about the position they disagree with. It is a bit lazy on your part.
- sixothree 9y agoYou're exactly correct. It was lazy. This is hacker news and we have something special here. One-liners like that are deserving of your response. That was the feeling evoked by the comment. I was taking a break from work and didn't spend time explaining. There are so many reasons I find that comment bothersome. But mostly it's probably my upbringing in the deep south where any intellectual pursuit would put you into the category of "odd nut" whose time spent on a subject was worthy of dismissal because of "common sense" is more important.
- regularfry 9y agoNow it's been pointed out, it's blindingly obviously wrong to me, for one reason: the "live butterfly" looks more aerodynamic. Entertainingly, this is no less wrong: the one time a live butterfly is likely to have forward-stretched wings is in flight.
- pimlottc 9y ago> Entertainingly, this is no less wrong: the one time a live butterfly is likely to have forward-stretched wings is in flight. I'm sorry, do you have evidence for this assertion? The author specifically addresses this, saying the position is atypical even during flight. It just seems rude to me to dismiss the author's argument so flippantly with what seems to be an unfounded supposition.
- regularfry 9y agoUgh. Off the high horse, please. I'm not disagreeing with the author. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs&t=79 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7a7ZAqWBIs&t=79 shows a butterfly manoeuvring in flight such that it stretches its wings forward. My statement was simply that if a butterfly is ever going to have its wings forward, it will be while it is in flight. Stop looking for drama where there isn't any.
- anigbrowl 9y agoTell me what you're expert in and I'll find examples of its misapplication that are really annoying to you. This kind of dismissal-by-ignorance is one of the reasons we can't have nice things. a dead butterfly is more aesthetically pleasing than a living one due to the outstretched wings No it isn't; you're just used to seeing them that way. There's an excellent scientific reason for it, since it facilitates species identification, but I'd rather see butterflies portrayed alive than dead unless that's semantically appropriate (eg for a gothic aesthetic). I have a garden and we let it run fairly wild to attract bird and insect life, so I have lots of real butterflies, bees etc to look at.
- watwut 9y ago"No it isn't; you're just used to seeing them that way." Being used to things looking certain way is always factor in what people find aesthetically pleasing. It goes for color preferences, shapes and pretty much anything else too.
- anigbrowl 9y agoYou know, I went on to address that in the very next sentence.
- notatoad 9y agoAren't "pet peeves" kind of silly by definition? if it weren't silly, it would be a legitimate concern rather than a pet peeve. I did find this really interesting though. Sort of a window into a world i'd never otherwise think about.
- ouid 9y agoI always thought that it was weird to keep peeves as pets.
- asciimo 9y agoYet we don't illustrate other colorful animals as though they are being drawn and quartered. The aesthetic pleasure is diminished when we think that the subject is dead.
- amelius 9y agoIt's silly because the depiction does not show a "dead" butterfly per definition: this is something that the human viewer makes of it (through reference to the prepared butterflies), and in this case the article writer is trying to enforce that view on us. For all we know, a butterfly could find such pictures attractive. Half-baked analogy. A person in split-leg position is not natural. We rarely see people in such position. But to say that [1] is a picture of a dead person would be clearly nonsense. [1] https://images.clipartof.com/small/28591-Clipart-Illustration-Of-A-Black-Silhouetted-Female-Gymnast-Doing-The-Splits.jpg https://images.clipartof.com/small/28591-Clipart-Illustratio...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rwallace 9y agoWell, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; personally I find the live one more aesthetically pleasing.
- strictnein 9y agoDon't anyone show her what a human heart actually looks like.
- Asooka 9y agoWell, the inverted scrotum we use right now is a better symbol of lust anyway.
- mikeash 9y agoGreat, I'll never be able to un-see that.
- anc84 9y agoFor a very long time I thought <3 was a variation of :3
- mixedCase 9y agoThank you, you will now make me picture a scrotum with eyes everytime I see that.
- kyberias 9y agoLet me introduce you to the record label called Love Records and their logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Records
- throwanem 9y agoIs it? I'm not sure I'd be feeling so lusty if someone inverted mine.
- taneq 9y agoI always thought it looked like a butt, from the point of view of a person getting oral from the owner of said butt.
- taejo 9y ago
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- j_m_b 9y agoInteresting article. Something else I'll notice everywhere, like bad kerning. Thanks ;)
- natch 9y agoOK you pronounce "Bejing" with a normal, regular, everyday hard 'j' sound as it's supposed to be pronounced (not some fake exotic sounding airy zzzhhhhhh sound you and everyone else just made up out of thin air) and I promise not to kill or pin any butterflies. I really thought the peeve was going to be about pictures of butterflies on people's mouths (Silence of the Lambs). That bugs me, but I guess with the movie it was supposed to.
- woah 9y agoDo you want it pronounced like "edging" or "aging"?
- Epenthesis 9y agoDo you pronounce those differently? Where'd you grow up? In all the English dialects I'm familiar with, those are pronounced the same. Regardless, it's the "j sound" of "James" (as well as of both "edging" and "aging" for those of you who pronounce them the same) and not the "j sound" of "Jaques" (or the "z" sound of "azure"). (For those familiar with IPA, /be.'dʒiɲ/ not /be.'ʒiɲ/)
- amyjess 9y agoIf you really want to get pedantic, it should be an unaspirated "ch" (as opposed to q, which is aspirated like "ch" usually is in English). And if you want to get even more pedantic, it's a dual-articulated sound and not a pure postalveolar sound like in English. That is, IPA [t͡ɕ] Edit: And if anyone's curious, there are four sounds in Mandarin that English-speakers will interpret as forms of "ch", varying based on aspiration and point(s) of articulation. In Pinyin, all four have distinct romanizations (which is one advantage Pinyin has over Wade-Giles). Pinyin IPA Articulation Aspirated ch [ʈ͡ʂʰ] postalveolar retroflex Y zh [ʈ͡ʂ] postalveolar retroflex N q [t͡ɕʰ] dual alveolo-palatal Y j [t͡ɕ] dual alveolo-palatal N By contrast, English "ch" is postalveolar but not retroflex, and aspiration depends on context: IPA [t͡ʃʰ] or [t͡ʃ].
- patorjk 9y agoAlthough it's a silly pet peeve, it's interesting to realize that the standard pose society has adopted for butterflies is one in which they're typically dead. Definitely changes the way I look at pictures of butterflies.
- _ph_ 9y agoI never noticed, but it is indeed a bit odd that most drawings show butterflies in a position they would't assume while living. Of course there is artistic freedom, but when a realistic display is intended, a more true-to life posture should be used.
- Declanomous 9y agoThe reason why nature illustrations look a particular way is actually really interesting. I don't have a source to show, but we actually learned a bit about biological illustrations as part of my biology degree. To make a long story short, illustrations tend to depict what you are trying to show. An unnatural position might be the best way to illustrate an organism if you are providing a guide for people to classify them with, especially if you can only provide a single photo. The more natural depictions of birds, etc. can all basically be traced back to John James Audubon. Before then almost every illustration looked exceedingly staged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon#Art_and_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon#Art_and_met...
- sopooneo 9y agoI think this may just be another instance of the coconut affect. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
- knice 9y agoI once had a job making ice cream and it bothered me that I had to add yellow food coloring to the banana ice cream. We used real bananas and didn't add banana flavor. But I was told to add yellow color anyway.
- compiler-guy 9y agoThere is an old cooking adage that, "You eat with your eyes first." Making food aesthetically pleasing does add flavor to that first sample.
- jimmaswell 9y agoI saw something about a restaurant where the food is served in the dark a while ago, so that this can't happen.
- nocman 9y agoWow, I'm not sure I'd want to eat in a restaurant that purposefully prevented me from seeing what I was eating! xD
- FreeFull 9y agoThinking about it, it's weird that people expect the ice cream to be yellow anyway, since I can't say I've ever seen a banana with yellow flesh.
- jacobolus 9y agoHere are the bananas that were used when all of these recipes were originally written: http://www.ars-grin.gov/npgs/images/may/musa/TARS17155-fruit.jpg http://www.ars-grin.gov/npgs/images/may/musa/TARS17155-fruit... Banana flavoring is also based on the flavor of Gros Michel bananas, which is why it doesn’t taste like the Cavendish bananas commonly available today. If you want to see a very yellow inside of a banana, get a very ripe plantain (completely black peel) and fry slices.
- erroneousfunk 9y agoFascinating! I have a dozen dead butterflies, pinned in frames at home (I really like http://www.bugunderglass.com/ http://www.bugunderglass.com/ if anyone's interested in unique home decorating -- I'm not associated with them in any way, but I've been buying their bugs for almost 6 years now!) and I used to raise moths from local caterpillars when I was a kid (you know, back before I found computers and actually played outside). I knew the difference between dead and alive butterfly/moth wing positions, but never consciously noticed the difference in artistic depictions. Heck, I volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science every week and must have seen that Monarchs poster a hundred times without noticing. Comparing art that "did it right" and art that "did it wrong" -- yeah, if you do it right, it looks a LOT more realistic and "lively," even if I wouldn't have known why before reading this article. I'll have to keep an eye out from now on!
- hobofan 9y agoRaising a death's-head hawkmoth was one of the coolest projects my mother did with us when we were children! It is really neat to experience their entire development process firsthand.
- c3534l 9y agoThis is one of those things you can't unsee. I'm going to be walking around the world now seeing butterflies drawn in death-poses.
- coderholic 9y agoHeh so true - I've seen "dead butterflies" at least 3 times since reading this this morning! Enlightening and frustrating in equal measure!
- my_ghola 9y agoBut do all dead butterflies get into that pose? I'm sure some of the ones with more natural looking poses are dead too.
- setr 9y agoI'm pretty sure none of them naturally die in that pose; its an artificial death pose rendered for the sake of identification
- mrob 9y agoTrue, but if it's natural looking then we can give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it's alive. The dead looking pose doesn't happen naturally, it's arranged like that by humans, and that's only possible if the butterfly is dead.
- c3534l 9y agoI think it's like when you have a human corpse with his wrists crossed on top of the chest. Sure, not all or,actually, hardly any people are buried with that pose. It'd still be weird if you always drew people sleeping like that.
- pferde 9y agoPlease, enough with the blog sites that do not show any article at all without javascript!
- anigbrowl 9y agoI fully agree that people should stop doing that when making blogs, but you can hardly demand that people stop submitting interesting content just because said contact has been hijacked by hyperactive designers/service providers. Boycotting a technology you don't like is ineffective unless it's monopolized and there a single provider on whom to focus the boycott efforts. Extensions that filter out such annoyances (like adblockers) are somewhat effective but result in arms races. Subversion through 3rd party tagging or the creation of other undesirable second-order effects seems like the best strategy. Perhaps someone with more technical knowledge could come up with better suggestions. It's a valid problem, which I encourage you to consider, write up, and submit in its own right.
- mrob 9y agoThis one, like many others, is perfectly readable without Javascript if you disable CSS (in Firefox: View, Page Style, No Style).
- darkerside 9y agohttps://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/images/vm/leonardo.jpg https://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/im...
- ManeSequins 9y agoSee also: ubiquitous depictions of bright red shrimp, crabs, and lobsters swimming around in the ocean.
- colanderman 9y agoAs a rabbit "parent", I now shake my head at every depiction of a rabbit with pads on its feet like a cat(!) (Rabbits' feet are padless and entirely covered with fur.) viz. every cartoon with visible foot bottoms here: https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=easter+bunny https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=easter+bunny Also… rabbits don't typically eat carrots, they eat carrot tops. (Just like how cats don't drink milk, and mice don't eat cheese. Sure, they like it, but where would a mouse find cheese in the wild?)
- xherberta 9y agoI guess as long as there has been cheese, mice have been eating it.
- kgwgk 9y agoDon't red shrimps, crabs and lobsters exist as well?
- mast 9y agoI can understand how an illustrator could be bothered by something like this. It is your job to be accurate yet you see so many examples where others do not meet your own standards. Slightly off topic (and related to moths not butterflies), but this sites includes wonderful detail on how moths are prepared high resolution scans: http://ottawa.moths.ca/technical.html http://ottawa.moths.ca/technical.html
- moultano 9y agoI started following a bunch of paleo-artists on twitter and now I find it hard to look at kids' dinosaur stuff anymore. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/03/03/zombie-hands-to-bird-wings-the-evolution-of-the-dinosaur-w/ http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/03/03/zombie-h...
- murbard2 9y agoTo be honest, the dead butterflies do look aesthetically more pleasing. I can't tell if it's because the image is culturally ingrained or if the shape is simply more elegant. That said, I welcome this knowledge which opens a whole new opportunity for me to be pedantic at parties.
- eckza 9y agoHacker News: helping all of us be fun at parties, since always.
- badosu 9y ago- Look at all those butterflies, isn't her shirt lovely? - They're all dead... The life of the party!
- farnsworth 9y agoI have to agree - the live butterfly shape is clearly more aerodynamic and realistic, but that long leading edge perpendicular to the body just makes me think of a stealth bomber or 747 for some reason. The dead butterfly shape is delicate and elegant. Besides identification, maybe that's another reason that they mount them that way.
- vacri 9y agoIt's not identification or elegance; they're mounted that way so that you can see all of the wings. The live butterfly position has overlapping wings, and you can't see all of the detail.
- murbard2 9y agoYes! A B2-A is exactly what it evokes for me too. There's something not aerodynamic, and thus "inefficient" about the dead butterfly shape that makes it pretty and sophisticated.
- rhaps0dy 9y ago
- laplace2 9y agoI'm glad to have this pointed out to me. It's so "obvious" now that live butterflies don't look that way, I'll never not notice this now. It's similar to all the tricks video media uses for aesthetics and common familiarity: gun cocking noises, computer hacking images, punch sound effects, and the like. It also remind me of location specific tricks, such as how the pyramids of Giza, Egypt are shown in pictures, or how wildlife photographers sometimes do staged photoshoots. I think it's a very good thing to be aware of this. So much of our information is received through indirect means, how many things do we watch on video without understanding how the image and sound has been enhanced? I've been surprised before to see something in person and realize the media representation is not accurate.
- LordKano 9y agoI don't think I would have ever noticed this but now, I think I will always notice it.
- yourapostasy 9y ago> So much of our information is received through indirect means... I suspect it is worse than that. Much of the actionable information that our civilization relies upon seems effectively "binary-only" and behind "firewalls" of field practice. Take water sanitation, for example. Exactly how does one set up an industrial-scale water sanitation plant for say, 5,000 residential units? There are design books and guides aplenty. But that aeration pump they say you need on page 315, how are you to know who makes one that will last, and is supported well? It's not like McMaster-Carr shows reviews from customers like Amazon. If you are outside the field, or new to it, then you come down to blindly guessing, getting told what to do by corporate policy, or getting the scoop from the grizzled veterans. This seems pervasive to me, everywhere I turn. There seems to be a Simplifying Assumptions Field (SAF) around not just how information is presented, but how we actually model the information we consume, and it take assiduous effort to turn off in most people. Unless you place yourself into the mindset of "okay, if civilization ended and I could turn to no one else to figure this out, what problems will I run into trying to reproduce what I'm being told here from scratch, by myself?", it is all too easy to blindly accept the kinds of tricks you see on media, and one of the most pernicious tricks is accepting that being told information about something is almost as good as doing it, and doing it well. I suppose this is why I'm not a fan of even most Internet-delivered broadcast media like Netflix/Hulu/Amazon-Video (not to speak of conventional media, aside from books): actionable information, that is, information I can take and reproduce an action/insight/process/result/object/etc. to the same fidelity/quality level (given enough practice), is very sparse in that part of the world. Documentaries are a gray area for me: if I could read a transcript and get the information 2-5X faster, I'd like them more, but I grow restless with the slow presentation in most documentaries (documentaries at 2X speed on YouTube generally can get my attention, though). Maker and MOOC content for example, seems more actionable to me, though of course YMMV. I sometimes wonder if we are too harsh on those presenting information to make the information easily-digestible, and too rigid to accept that sometimes we simply don't know pieces of information or can't get the perfect video shot, and settle for entertainment value instead of actionable value.
- J5892 9y agoLPT: If a friend has a tattoo that you now recognize as a dead butterfly, you probably shouldn't tell them.
- bm1362 9y agoI have a tattoo that is a butterfly with a skull in the middle. It's wings are in the upright position, meaning it's dead and pinned so uh I guess it's okay? It's a bad tattoo either way and has become a pretty regular joke. If any of my friends are reading this; it's too late to tease me.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoButterfly? Deaths Head Hawk Moths have a skull on the thorax (http://www.ukmoths.org.uk/species/acherontia-atropos/adult-3/ http://www.ukmoths.org.uk/species/acherontia-atropos/adult-3... )· They're hawk moths, not butterflies.
- bm1362 9y agoI'm aware, it's been mistaken for a butterfly (mostly my friends teasing me) a few times so I've somewhat owned the joke now. This is more representative: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Acherontia_lachesis_MHNT_Female_N%C3%AElg%C3%AEri_%28Tamil_Nadu%29.jpg/161px-Acherontia_lachesis_MHNT_Female_N%C3%AElg%C3%AEri_%28Tamil_Nadu%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Ac...
- notadoc 9y agoI rarely see any butterflies these days
- elihu 9y agoThe population of Monarch butterflies in the U.S. has declined quite a bit since the 90's. I'm not sure if other species have had similar declines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#Threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly#Threats
- roguecoder 9y agoThis is a great example of how detailed, specific nerd-ery about just about any topic can be super-cool and interesting!
- pvaldes 9y agoThis would be like to say "please stop to drawn the parts of a flower and opened fruits in botanical illustrations. Is gruesome to see all those mutilated plants". There is a reason to drawn both wings in the same plane, is much easier to classificatory purposes and is needed in some special cases because butterflies can have totally different marks in its right and left wings.
- aurizon 9y agoSadly, butterflies and other insects are pinned like this for entomological examination, which requires the wings, antenna, legs etc are fully extended so that all manner of detail can be seen. Many species are different in minor ways, having reached a very similar body design by evolutionary convergence. Numbers of spines, hairs, scales etc are all enumerated. Once dry, they get very very brittle and you can not spread wings/legs etc in fear of breakage. It sounds strange, but a number of beetles, butterflies and other insects have been discovered that look the same - until you examine some of these esoteric aspects. Genomic analysis is the gold standard in these matters. read a few of these search hits. https://www.google.ca/search?q=entomological+examination+of+similar+species&oq=entomological+examination+of+similar+species&aqs=chrome..69i57.19966j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#safe=active&q=entomological+variation+of+similar+species https://www.google.ca/search?q=entomological+examination+of+...
- kgwgk 9y agoYour comment reminded me of something I read recently: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3036677/New-monkey-species-discovered-scientists-notice-unusual-shape-penis.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3036677/New-m...
- aurizon 9y agoYes, insects are full of mimicry...
- mirimir 9y agoOne could write an analogous article about birds. In painting the 435 images in The Birds of America, John James Audubon probably shot at least a few of each species. And then stuffed and mounted them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon#/media/File:John_James_Audubon_1826.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon#/media/File...
- eth0up 9y agoThis lady's art is stunning. I highly recommend not leaving at the dead butterfly article. The portfolio, in particular.
- elmalto 9y agoThis is really incredible. Thank you for this insightful post
- rrauenza 9y agoMy wife had an interesting perspective I'll share: "Maybe it helps to think of illustrated butterflies as a kind of iconography...One of the first things little kids (especially girls) learn to draw is “a butterfly” (meaning, a dead butterfly). It will not have anything like natural coloring, and might have big friendly eyes, but will definitely have two curling antennae and spread, uplifted wings. It’s a heraldic image, like a lion rampant. Lions don’t look like that, but the symbol says what it needs to." Now all I can think of is the perl6 butterfly, Camelia...
- DonaldFisk 9y agoWith butterflies, it doesn't matter much if you set them in their wings-flat resting position, as you can still see all of both pairs of wings, but with other lepidoptera it definitely does make a difference. With few exceptions, when moths are resting, their hind wings are hidden, but setting them in the traditional way allows both wings to be seen. So I suppose for consistency, butterflies are set the same way that moths (i.e. all other lepidoptera) are. Incidentally, with a bit of practice you can sneak up to resting or feeding butterflies and photograph them close-up (e.g. with a smartphone), provided you don't make sudden movements. So now you can have proof of sighting and a permanent visual record without the need to kill them.
- davvolun 9y agoI've never seen such a shocking injustice I cared so little about!