How does a butterfly look like a "dead head". Caterpillar butterfly "dead head"

Among the insects found on the territory of Russia, the largest is the butterfly-brazier "dead head". The thickness of her body reaches 2 cm, length - 6 cm, and the wingspan - 13 cm. This arthropod can not even be called an insect. It is more like a bird or a winged beast. Butterfly "dead head" has long been terrifying people. Many legends are associated with it. Believe it or not, everyone decides for himself.

Beliefs associated with a butterfly

It is believed that a meeting with a "dead head" heralds the death of one of the members of the family. To prevent this from happening, the butterfly should be killed.

If the scales from the wizard's wing fall into the eye, it will lead to imminent blindness and quick death.

In 1733 in France the epidemic of smallpox slashed thousands of human lives. The superstitious French attacked the arrival of the "dead head" in these places.

Is it possible that the brave "dead head" is a butterfly, carrying death, disease, war, epidemic, devastation and hunger? Certainly, this is a monstrous heresy, although impressionable people still attribute such properties to a large insect. But butterflies are not even carriers of dangerous diseases for humans, unlike lice and many mammals.

Mystical butterfly in literature and cinema

Fear of her was also fueled by writers. So, the science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev described the winged lepidoptera in the story "The Dead Head", giving the butterfly a fictional giant size, and the famous for his mystical novels Edgar Poe in the "Sphinx" used this butterfly to catch up more fear on the protagonist. Susan Hill in the Gothic novel "I'm in the castle of the king" terrified one of the characters, using the anatomical features of the insect.

Cinematographers more than once included a gambler in the script of thrillers to aggravate the atmosphere of fear.

In the "Silence of the Lambs", a killer maniac puts a girlish doll in the mouth of his victims. He hopes that this will help fulfill his desire to become a woman.

Ole Bornemalle showed a cluster of butterfly-brazhnikov in one of the episodes of the thriller "Casket of Curse", released in 2012.

Origin and meaning of the name

Brazhnik "dead head" in the atlas-classifiers in Latin is called as the atherontium atropos. Acheron is one of the five rivers of the realm of the dead. By the same word, the ancients referred to the deep and terrible hell. "Atropa" is translated as "inevitability, inevitable fate." This name is the goddess of fate, one of the three moir, the one that breaks the thread of a person's life.

In common speech, in many peoples, a skull pattern with empty eye sockets and two bones, which evokes identical associations, was expressed in a similar way. Therefore, they call it everywhere almost the same - the butterfly "dead head" or "head of Adam".

Butterfly cry - another reason for fear

The reason for the people's fear is also the fact that the bride is able to make a piercing thin cry, like a squeak. And it makes the head, or rather the mouth. For insects, this is not typical. Grasshoppers or cicadas, entertaining in the summer our hearing with chirring, publish it with their feet, and the brazier does it with his mouth. Hearing organs are also located on his head.

An uninvited guest is a sign of trouble?

Another reason for the adoption was that the butterfly "dead head" is not a native and permanent resident of the European continent. Her homeland and permanent area is North Africa. In countries of strict light, it is not always chosen. It depends on weather conditions, climate change, etc. There is no exact information on this. However, each year the butterflies migrate to the northern regions. In other years they travel to Iceland to the north and to Iran to the east. On the territory of Russia the butterfly "dead head" met in Karelia, near Petrozavodsk and St. Petersburg. Much more often she visits the Kaluga, Moscow, Penza, Smolensk, Saratov, Astrakhan and Volgograd regions, as well as the Krasnodar Territory and the Caucasus. Some sources testify that they observed the bride even in Siberia - in the south of the Tyumen region. In the second generation, female sharks are sterile, and the population can be resumed only due to a new wave of migrants.

What drives these amazing animals from their native places? Probably, still not the desire to bring information about impending disasters, but a banal search for food.

What eats a terrible butterfly?

What does the "dead head" butterfly eat? Her favorite food is floral nectar and sweet woody juice. If juicy fruits come across, then she will drink their juice, although preference is given to liquid syrupy food. On the island of Madagascar, scammers pollinate orchids, since in some species of this butterfly the proboscis is longer than one and a half centimeters. Unlike other insects and birds of the hummingbird, which are also pollinators of flowers, the brazier can not freeze in flight over the object. He needs a firm support. This support and a large number of nectar is in beehive hives. "Dead head" - a butterfly, the very nature arranged to eat honey from the hives. The sound that she publishes is identical to that heard by the bees from the new uterus that emerges from the cocoon. It is interesting that it can be heard not only from the butterfly, but also from the pupa, and from the caterpillar. The bees, hearing their soothing squeak, do not perceive the sorcerer as an enemy and a robber. However, sometimes they nevertheless expose an uninvited guest. There have been cases when bees squeezed the sorcerer to death, although he can withstand up to three bee stings without damage to his health.

Scary demon of the night

If you look at the pictures, then the blown-out wingsman does not make an awesome impression at all. And what does the dead-end butterfly look like at night? After all, the brazier is a night butterfly. It can be met at dusk, when the sun is falling toward the sunset. Until midnight, huge insects circling in the light of street lights or other sources of artificial light. This is the marriage dances of adult males and females. Extraordinarily beautiful, though very rare sight. How does the butterfly-brawler look like a "dead head" in the night illumination? Very impressive - on the black velvet body clearly looms the head of a dead man with empty eye sockets and a failure instead of a nose. Superstitious horror skuet any, and not just an exalted person with a subtle psyche. As they say: "Everyone wants to paradise, but no one wants to die." And yet you should not be afraid of a sorcerer.

This kind of butterflies and so many got from people. They are periodically brought into the Red Book as a vanishing sight. Being night animals, they do not do any harm, and against penetration into the hives there is a long-proven method. Beekeepers protect their honey from an uninvited guest with bars with holes no more than one and a half centimeters. Through them, easily pass the bees and drones, but not the scammers. These sweet tooth are too thick.

Caterpillars

In addition to apiaries, you can meet sailors in the fields. In the old days, females laid eggs on potato beds. Their larvae were happy to feed the juicy tops. After the fields began to be mass processed against the Colorado beetle, the braziers stopped placing their offspring there. Caterpillars of the butterfly "dead head" can eat foliage and other plants from the family of nightshade - tomato, fizalisa, eggplant, nightshade, datura, belladonna. Being polyphages, the larvae of the "dead head" eat green carrots, carrots, beets, and other root crops. They can live in gardens, absorbing the leaves of fruit trees and shrubs. During this period they cause very significant damage to agriculture.

The butterfly lays bluish or greenish eggs in the sinuses between the leaves and trunk of these plants, and also glues to the underside of the leaves. Eggs have a size of 1.2 to 1.5 mm. Larvae of the first age are covered with sparse hairs and are no longer than 1.2 cm long, and the last, the fifth, already reach 15 cm and weigh up to 22 g. At the posterior end of the caterpillar there is an outgrowth that resembles a horn. Larvae of the ghoul are very beautiful. They are bright green with oblique dark strips. Among the leaves, it is easy not to notice them. There are species with yellow-green coloration and even with white and blue.

For pupation, caterpillars burrow into the ground to a depth of 40 cm. Occasionally they creep out to the surface to eat. Before the transition to the state of the pupa, the caterpillar lives for about eight weeks. Pupae reincarnate in a butterfly for a month. Shortly before they go outside, they begin to emit sounds typical for this species of arthropods. Female members of the gangsters are larger and round in shape compared to males. In coloring male specimens there is more black, the pattern is more harsh and expressive. Usually two cycles of life of this type of insects take place in a year, but in a good, especially warm summer, the marriages are able to increase the cycle of their reproduction up to three times.

The coloring of butterflies and larvae varies, because the brazier has more than 1200 species. Yes, and the "dead head" itself, that is, a butterfly with a corresponding pattern on the body, also has a lot of varieties.

Brazhnik - an integral part of biogeocenosis

Butterfly "dead head" makes its considerable contribution to the overall ecosystem of our planet. Large individuals pollinate plants with a pestle deep inside the flower. With this work can not cope with other insects. Brazhniki are a protein food for a variety of fauna - in the daytime, the sleepy night butterfly-brazhnik is an easy prey for many mammals and birds.