Little Blue Butterfly

A beautiful sunrise at Casa Ono sans Chuck's house.

    Saturday morning was lovely.  Before seven, I was able to nab a photo of a fleecy cloud lit by the rays of the sun as he nosed above Hualalai.  I'm including a picture of the beautiful sunrise.  Having nothing but time on my hands, I used the clone brush to remove Chuck's roof from the right

foreground.  Other people have taken up baking during the quarantine.  We were already baking, so Sandra has taken up painting and I am spending more time fooling around with my pictures.

   Soon Sandra was coffeed up and we were off to Kahalu'u.  She was excited to go, having read the report of all the fine fish and critters that Peter and I encountered a couple days before, but she was also excited to see the tiny blue butterflies.

   As per the new usual, we parked on the hillside above the beach park.  If our only goal was swimming, it would have been far more convenient to park in the shuttered car park.  As it was, this was the perfect location for butterfly watching.

    Before I got out the door, Sandra had spotted the tiny blue butterflies in the weeds of the vacant lot.  This time we would take pictures and I had the camera at the ready.  As is the case with most butterflies, their flight is quick and irregular.  Hence, I proceeded to take pictures of the weeds,

Lesser Grass Blue Butterfly in resting position

hoping to catch a tiny butterfly in the frame.  In one instance, we spotted a butterfly in resting position and were able to get a pretty good picture of that particular insect.  The other picture that I'm showing you here is a tiny blue butterfly caught at the edge of a frame and enlarged dramatically.  Its sort of amazing that we got useful pictures using this method.

    Back at the ranch, we cropped the pictures and we were very pleased that we had captured these little blue butterflies.  As I mentioned in the prior blog, the only little blue butterfly that should be on our island, as noted in the Hawaii insect museum and other sites, is the Blackburn's blue butterfly.  We had thought this species was only to be found in the same habitat as the Kamehameha butterfly, upland forests.  To get a confirmed identification, I emailed my pictures and field notes to Daniel Rubinoff, the butterfly guy at Hawaii-Manoa.  Here is what he said:

The right way to grow old...sitting in the warm water at Kahalu'u.

Hi Jeff,   That's the lesser grass blue, very small. Came in a few years ago. Zizina otis... yes they are widespread across the islands, especially at low elevations...Dan

    Interestingly, when you look up this butterfly on Wikipedia, you find that it uses plants of the legume family for a host plant.  First on their list is  Alysicarpus vaginalis, which is a common ground cover.  Perhaps it is no coincidence that this is the plant on which the butterfly is perched in my "resting position" picture.  

   So there you have it, yet another introduced species, one so new that it is just finding its proper place on the internet.  If you find yourself in Hawaii, having completed your 14 day mandatory quarantine, look in the grass as you walk to the beach.  Quite possibly you will see Zizina otis.  Highly preferable to seeing a snake in the grass.  Like Donald Trump!

   Down at the beach, Sandra and I were amused to see two kapunas filling the entryway into the bay.

Rockmover intermediate, note the antennae and fin markings.

  As we entered, we said hello and they scooted aside so we didn't get too close.  The tide was near the low high tide, perhaps plus six inches and the water in which the friendly kapunas were sitting was in

the upper eighties.  What a deal for them.

   Out in the bay, there was little current, the water was cooler, but very clear.  Early on we saw a small rockmover that was in the transition phase, moving up from being a dragon wrasse. He was very furtive.  I could tell that he wanted to swim out and flop around like a dragon wrasse, but somehow knew that in his current form he could no longer imitate a piece of seaweed.  He retained the long antennae of the dragon wrasse and some of the alternating markings on his dorsal fin.  Sadly, he was too big to imitate seaweed and too shy for me to get a good picture. I have hyped the contrast in this mediocre picture in hopes that you can see the antennae and the fins.

   Kahalu'u may be the best place in Hawaii to look at rockmovers, so its surprising that we don't see this intermediate form more often.  As we started to swim away we both saw a tiny green dragon wrasse, perhaps about an inch in length.  This fellow was doing a convincing imitation of a piece of  wave tossed seaweed. 

   Following that I took a picture of a very high crowned cone shell,probably an Imperial cone.  Since that species of cone is usually found at depth, we can assume a hermit crab had brought it to the bay.

A Mourning Gecko.  Definitely not an insurance salesman.

   Later in our swim we saw a trio of barred jacks.  Basically, we just had a good time swimming together in the warm water...with very few competing swimmers.

    We started the blog with a picture from our home and so we are going to end it.  Sandra trapped this unusual spotted gecko in her office window.  Her research indicates that this is a mourning gecko.  Here he is getting his picture taken prior to release.  In this instance, the gecko is mourning the fact that his Facebook status has been changed from indoor gecko to outdoor gecko.  In any event, don't buy car insurance from this lizard.

jeff