Beauty is a Beast

Beautiful markings

See just a glimpse of blue at the top of the wing

 While hiking, we glimpsed an iridescent blue amidst the green of the forest, and this gorgeous butterfly flittered out and landed on a nearby leaf. With its wings up, it’s not nearly as beautiful, though the under-wing markings are still striking. We harassed it, trying to get a picture of the dorsal side of the wings, but it easily avoided us by heading deeper into the forest. We saw another one later, with a gimpy wing (no, we did not make it gimpy) that afforded a peek of the blue coloration. I looked it up online and discovered that it’s a Peleides Blue Morpho (Morpho peleides), common to Central and South America as well as Trinidad. The beast part? The larvae are cannibalistic.