Nom nom nom.

This startling image of a brown anole (Anolis sagrei) munching on a cloudless sulphur (Phoebis sennae) butterfly was taken by garden visitor Julie Wright who is also a member of the MOSI Outside Flickr group. This great picture leads to a very common question in the butterfly garden: What eats butterflies?

The answer: Darn near anything that can catch them at any stage of the game. Here's a short list of predators: ladybugs (eat eggs), ants, spiders, wasps, parasitic wasps, parasitic flies, birds, rats, toads, frogs, lizards, praying mantis, snakes, children. The list of species that attack butterflies in their various life stages is pretty long and we will suffice it to say that butterflies have LOTS of predators.

To combat this, butterflies have a wonderful array of mechanisms to hide, taste bad, or look like they taste bad.

• Eggs laid under leaves are harder to sport for predators.
• Striped caterpillars are hard for black-and-white seeing predators to pick out and ones that look like poop (giant swallowtails for instance) look appetizing to no one.
• Many chrysalis look like dead leaves, twigs, or leaf buds.
• Many butterfly have bad flavors to predators which are determined by poisonous host plants and some other butterflies will mimic these distasteful ones.
• Some butterflies have large eye spots to scare off predators.
• Some butterflies are more inventive like the Mourning Cloak. When threatened, they will let go of their branch and fall to the ground like a dead leaf, never trying to fly away. They will lay on the ground until danger has passed and then move on.