Category Archives: Flowers

Praying mantis eating a wasp

Yesterday, I posted about the dangers geckos pose to a praying mantis that has been living on a spider lily.

Today’s post is about the advantage of that location for the mantis. The primary benefit is that the spider lily’s flowers attract wasps, bees and other insects. In these photos, the mantis has caught a good-sized paper wasp, securely held by its forelegs. It held the wasp in that position for a while, but once it began its meal, it made short work of devouring the wasp. Next day I saw it with a bee and a beetle.

As the spider lily flowers fade, new ones pop up on other stalks, so the insect attraction has been fairly continuous.

Costus lucanusianus

Costus lucanusianus is a native of tropical Africa. It’s also known as spiral ginger or African spiral flag. It’s related to true gingers and the ‘spiral’ in the name comes from the arrangement of the leaves on the stems.

This one was at Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. For more information about Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, go to htbg.com.

Passion vine butterfly on a passion flower

This passion vine butterfly was feeding on passion flowers, but it will feed on many other flowers, too. It gets its name because passion vines are the host plant for the passion vine butterfly’s caterpillar. Those caterpillars spend their days munching leaves, many of which have little yellow bumps on them. The bumps, which can be seen in the photos, are the plants’ way of trying to fool the butterflies into believing that there are already eggs on the leaves and so it’s not a good spot to lay more.

It’s hard to know how effective this ruse is. I’ve seen many butterflies laying eggs on these leaves, but perhaps some are discouraged. Regardless, the caterpillars will move from leaf to leaf while chowing down, but they never seem to defoliate the plant, which is, in any case, a robustly growing vine.