Mating butterflies

I recently spent a couple of weeks in a cloud forest in Ecuador, volunteering at a biological reserve called Los Cedros, (website here). My main reason for going was to learn about and photograph plants and I will put up blogs about those in future once I’ve done some research. However, I also took photographs of animals – mostly moths – I don’t know much about these, I can’t name them or really much on the photos, so thought I would just post them largely without comment.

Insects

Hairy caterpillar

When the above insect flew it would become bright pink with blue wings, like a little fairy…

weevils fighting and mating

The above slightly blurry photo shows two weevils mating, while another tries to break them up. All the while ants crawl all over them, I think there must be some kind of symbiosis happening between the two different species and there are some other reports of this online.

The above is a happy looking bug I saw a few times. Below is the same bug mating

Metamorphosis

I believe the following photos are of the cases left by insects as they transformed from larvae into adults.They remained in the same places over several days. With the larva in the photo below there seems to be both moss and lichen, perhaps even fungi, growing out of the case.