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I found this girl standing on the edge of the cat food bowl. At first I thought she was eating cat food, but she was really eating the *butterflies* who came to eat cat food. She caught two of them, and tried unsuccessfully to catch several flies and a yellow jacket.

#insects #mantis #arthropods #photography

A large green praying mantis leans into the image from the right, her triangular head tilted toward us and her arms raised and folded. A stripe of white and reddish brown, like a strip of bacon, begins at the tip of her pointy mouthparts and runs up across her cheek, then across her eye without interruption. Her eyes are otherwise the plastic-textured grass green of the rest of her body, except for one fuzzy black speck like a contracted pupil, staring at us. She seems to be asking "Is this seat taken?" in a way that makes us wish we could say no, while knowing that we can't. Her antennae are elegantly attached to her head by joints that look like they might hold the screw-on antennae of a home wifi router. Their ribbed arcs stand above her head like expressive cartoon eyebrows. If we look closely at her folded arms we can see that their spiky inner surfaces are covered with a brown dust of butterfly scales.
Two fallen butterfly wings lying on a concrete wall. The closer one is dark burnt-orange with a pair of parallel squiggly brown stripes along its outer margin, and a row of brown polka dots just inside this. The side of the wing formerly near the butterfly's body is covered with long downy fur. Farther away, out of focus, we see another wing with lighter colors and brown and white polka dots.
#photography #mantis #insects #arthropods
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