This image is the prompt for the Kudos Short Poem Competition. More details at the end of this post.
I went to the zoo to look at the snakes. Yes, it's another today-I-went-to-the zoo post.
I'm writing a novel that involves a lot of snakes, including a main character with a snakes for hair. So I went to the zoo to see the snakes. Research, you know. There are many amazing snakes in beautiful enclosures — pythons, vipers, and colubrids — but I'll leave those for another post, because I couldn't leave without stopping by the butterfly house, where I snapped this photo.
Sometimes when I photograph an animal, I get a shot of the sign too so I can be sure to know what species they are. The scientific name means you'll always be able to find more about it later. But I didn't take any sign-photos at the butterfly house.
So I thought I'd try out Google to see what it would come up with. Machine learning has really taken off in recent years, and Google are at the heart of it with projects such as Alpha Go, TensorFlow, Waymo, and Google Assistant. So how close could Google come to picking the butterfly species?
Not so close. It's pretty different to the purple emperor (Apatura iris), and it's not even from Eurasia. But here's a marvelous photo of one for comparison by Flickr photographer berniedup via Wiki Commons (cc-by-sa-2.0):
Some googling for blue butterflies and the Melbourne zoo butterfly house made me briefly think it was a Ulysses Swallowtail (Papilio ulysses), as that's all that seemed to come up. But I eventually noticed it totally wasn't — it has no swallow's tail for one.
Ulysses Swallowtail by Lepidlizard for comparison: (public domain)
So I asked on Reddit's /r/whatsthisbug. What's this bug? Well, let's face it, butterflies might be pretty, and although they're not true bugs, they're still insects—daytime moths if you will, so "what's this bug" seems perfectly suitable to me.
And within ten minutes of posting I had a reply with the exact species: It's a Blue-banded Eggfly, Hypolimnas alimena, a butterfly associated with rainforests, usually further north in Australia than the butterfly house where it was living.
Here's a close up:
My friends @damianjayclay and @nikisteem have selected this image for their first Kudos Poetry Competition prompt. I haven't said much about the fragility, contrast, beauty, fleetingness or any other abstract things about this image, because I'm leaving it up to your imagination to write something for the the 50-word Kudos Poetry Competition. Good luck!
