Someone had recently left a comment on another post, about monarch predators, saying she had seen an assassin bug “suck the juices” from a monarch chrysalis. I gently let it climb onto my finger and placed it on a twig of a pawpaw sapling (most likely its dining hall as a larva). On her striking new album, pianist-composer Eva Novoa, aided and abetted by quartet members (Michaël Attias on alto saxophone, Max Johnson on bass and Jeff Davis on drums), offers up further evidence of the current surge of creative energy coming out of Brooklyn.

I’ve seen people get discouraged because they don’t see many caterpillars make it to adulthood in their yards. Here’s the thing: If I see a dead monarch in my yard, it’s because I have habitat for monarchs in my yard. This is a shining example of 21st-century contemporary jazz, balancing individual spotlighted glories with a strong ensemble identity.Lucid, subconscious, introverted, and taking B from Montreal to Los Angeles, Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams is an intimate perspective on the life of making music.

Novoa’s ectomorphic touch is both explorative, extrapolating and exciting as she and Attias’ pungent alto appear like a rolling ball of yarn that slowly unravels downhill and somehow rewinds on “The Drone” and the frenetic “Pre-Nerve Scale. One reference said that these swallowtails have a shorter proboscis than most, and are therefore more often seen on small flowers than are other species of swallowtails. Ecology, Behavior and Binomics: Herbivore Handling of a Plant's Trichome: The Case of Heliconius charithonia (L.I popped back out half-an-hour later and saw this: Newly eclosed female zebra longwing mates while hanging from chrysalis. An adult collects pollen by inserting its proboscis into the flower while making particular movements to secure adhesion to the pollen grains. Zebra longwings and gulf fritillaries carpet-bombed it with eggs, and for a good couple of months, dozens upon dozens of caterpillars had all the food they needed. At eclosion, the ratio is highly female biased, but the rest of the year the sex ratio is overall male biased (68% males). A taste for pollen is rare in the butterfly world - most species rely on sugar-laden nectar or fruit to provide the energy they need.

Groups have a social hierarchy that allows the oldest butterflies to pick the best sleeping spots before the others bed down around them. It's an amazing sight when the numbers of adult butterflies increase in the exhibition, and you see 30 or more of them cozying up together. As I snapped photographs, I noticed a new insect had joined the proceedings: Paper wasp attacks mating butterflies. Evaluating Female Remating Rates in Light of Spermatophore Degradation in Heliconius Butterflies: Pupal-mating Monandry versus Adult-mating Polyandry". On the dorsal side, the wings are black with narrow white and yellow stripes, with a similar pattern on the ventral side, but paler and with red spots.The chemical cue to mate is strong; Florida Native Plant Society’s Lilly Anderson-Messec says that not only do other species hang on chrysalides waiting for females, but that she’s seen males try to mate with dead females. The last Monk mood is his underappreciated solemnity, and it is reflected here during Novoa’s shadow casting with the Rhodes keyboard on “No Direction” as Attias draws the curtains with his eerie reed. These cookies are strictly necessary for the operation of the site, you can disable them by changing the settings of your browser but you will not be able to use the site normally. The sticky pollen, produced by the male reproductive organs of plants, is something most butterfly species do not bother eating.