Bottoms up to boozy butterflies

We tend to think of butterflies as being nectar drinkers - the simple squash of sugar and water produced by flowers.

But at this time of year, some butterflies turn their tastes to something more adult, as my windfall plums ably demonstrated last week. Several butterflies were coming down to drink oozing and fermenting fruit juice:

My first thirsty butterfly, above, was a Comma, not so easy to identify when seen from above apart from the fact that it has neat white socks. From the side, however, the 'comma' mark that gives it its name is easy to see, set against that incredible dead-leaf camouflage.

And if you thought all insects have six legs, just count the Comma's. Yup, four!

Actually they - and their cousins like the Red Admiral - have a pair of vestigial front legs held pressed against the body, so small in the Comma that you can't really see them. (In the Red Admiral, the front legs are fluffy making it look like they have a furry chest!).

Here is the Comma from above, such a handsome beast.

But back to the fruit - what is so attractive about rotting fruit that means many butterflies will risk venturing down to the ground for it?

Well, a study by Alison Ravencraft and Carol Boggs explored this and found that rotting fruit usually contains much higher amounts of salts and amino acids (basically proteins) than nectar, which may help with things such as egg production and survival of long-lived adult butterflies. This would then make sense for a butterfly such as a Comma which needs to make it right through the winter in hibernation, and the females need to be ready to lay eggs as soon as they emerge in spring.

However, it seems quite possible that the alcohol in rotting fruit may also be attractive to butterflies, and the close approach you can make to many when they are swigging juices would suggest, to me at least, that they can get a little on the intoxicated side.

So, bottoms up all you boozy butterflies. And I thought I'd finish today with a close-up of a Red Admiral, which had been drinkling merrily and was now needing to coil and uncoil its proboscis to clean it of sticky fluids. I was so focused on its tongue activity that I didn't notice that it had lost the tip of one of its antennae. It was lovely to see a butterfly still surviving, flying and drinking despite a handicap.