Glass Wing Butterfly

These photos were sent to me by a friend via email. He noted only that they are found in South America, and are very rare. Their beauty and the brevity of information he supplied piqued my curiousity, so I did a bit of research on these breathtakingly beautiful creatures. The following is from Wikipedia online encyclopedia:

Greta oto is a brush-footed butterfly, and is a member of the clearwing clade; its wings are transparent. Its most common English name is glasswing, and its Spanish name is espejitos, which means "little mirrors." Indeed, the tissue between the veins of its wings looks like glass. It is one of the more abundant clearwing species in its home range, which extends throughout Central America into Mexico. The opaque borders of its wings are dark brown sometimes tinted with red or orange, and its body is dark in color. Its wingspan is between 5.5 and 6 cm.

Adults inhabit the rainforest understory and feed on the nectar of a variety of tropical flowers. G. oto prefers to lay its eggs on plants of the tropical nightshade genus Cestrum. The silvery-gray caterpillars feed on these toxic plants and store the alkaloids in their tissues, making them distasteful to predators such as birds. They retain their toxicity in adulthood. The same alkaloids that make them poisonous also are converted into pheromones by the males, which use them to attract females.

G. oto adults also exhibit a number of interesting behaviors, such as long migrations and lekking among males.

What in the world is lekking, I wondered? So I followed the Wikipedia trail to another article, even more fascinating:

A lek (from Swedish lek, a noun which typically denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities) is a tournament (the males of certain species of animals for the purposes of competitive mating display), held before and during the breeding season, day after day, when the same group of males meet at a traditional place and take up the same individual positions on an arena, each occupying and defending a small territory or court. Intermittently or continuously they spar with their neighbours one at a time, or display magnificent plumage, or vocal powers, or bizarre gymnastics...

A strict hierarchy accords the most desirable top-ranking males the most prestigious central territory, with ungraded and lesser aspirants ranged outside. Females come to these arenas in due course to be fertilized, and normally they make their way through to one or other of the dominants in the centre. Two main types of lek are distinguished, classical leks and exploded leks. In classical leks, individuals are within sight of each other, physical contest is not infrequent, and can even be prevalent in some (mainly shorebird and gamebird) species.

Exploded leks rely on vocal signals, the most famous example is the "booming" behaviour of the Kakapo, where distances between individuals can be up to many kilometers due to the deep far-carrying call. Indeed, female kakapos seemed to often have considerable problems locating mates as the population declined on mainland New Zealand; this was a significant contributing factor to the insufficient reproduction rate which made this species to go extinct outside human care for some years.

The term was originally used most commonly for Black Grouse (orrlek) and for Capercaillie (tjäderlek), and lekking behaviour is quite common in birds of this type, such as Sage Grouse. However it is also shown by birds of other families, such as the Ruff, Great Snipe, Musk Ducks, Hermit hummingbirds, Manakins, birds of paradise and the Kakapo, by some mammals such as the Uganda kob (a waterbuck) and by some species of fish and even insects like the midge and the Ghost Moth. The rut of deer is also very similar. There is some dispute among ethologists as to whether the lekking behaviour shown by animals of widely different groups should really be treated as the same, and in particular whether similar selective pressures have led to their emergence.

Lek paradox: (or in other words, just one more of our Creator's amazing mysteries) persistent female choice for particular male trait values should erode genetic variance in male traits and thereby remove the benefits of choice; and yet choice persists. Most obvious in lekking species where females gain no material benefits or parental care from males.