Protection
The Common Crow is distasteful due to chemicals extracted from the latex of the food plants consumed in their caterpillar stage. Thus protected, they fly in a leisurely manner, gliding skillfully with wings held slightly above the horizontal. This indicates its protection due to inedibility to a predator. The inexperienced predator will try attacking it, but will learn soon enough to avoid this butterfly as the alkaloids in its body cause vomiting.
The butterfly has tough, leathery wings. When attacked it shams death and oozes liquid which causes any predators to release them. The butterfly thus has the ability to recover 'miraculously' after the predator thinks it has been killed.
Read more about this topic: Euploea Core
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“We all cry out that the world is corrupt,—and I fear too justly,—but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that it is our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)