It’s rare that I actually welcome an insect landing on me, which is usually a prelude to it biting me, but I was really happy when this Eastern Comma butterfly (Polygonia comma) decided it like the way that I tasted.
It initially landed right on my chest and began to lick my shirt and then moved over to the messenger bag in which I carry my camera gear. I carefully removed the bag and was able to get these shots while the Eastern Comma kept busy licking away my accumulated sweat (my apologies to those with delicate sensibilities, but these butterflies don’t land on pretty flowers and instead generally feed on the less photogenic sap, rotting fruit, and dung).
Normally this butterfly blends in well with its environment and is hard to see, but I guess that we would all agree that a blue Adidas bag is not its natural environment. It was also surprisingly easy to identify the butterfly. Last year I agonized in trying to decide if a butterfly I had photographed was a Question Mark or a Comma—the difference is in the shape of the white marking. Yes, those are actually the names of the butterflies. Who makes up these names? It’s the kind of job that I would enjoy.
I haven’t found any other insects named for punctuation marks, but won’t be surprised to find that there is an Asterisk caterpillar or an Ampersand beetle.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
You had me literally laughing out loud with this post, Mike, and I thank you deeply for that–I really need a good laugh today. Oh, the images that are conjured up by your proposed Asterisk Beetle! How about a Parenthetical Pill Bug or an Apostrophe Aphid?
We may have a good thing going. There are lots of insects out there that could be adopted into the punctuation family–maybe even a semicolon centipede.
How lovely! We have those over here, we don’t usually have the same types of butterflies.
That’s wonderful. I enjoy these butterflies a lot, because they are plain and drab when closed but amazingly colorful when they open their wings.
I like the underside of its wings. They remind me of an exotic cloth woven in some far off country-of the kind that everybody had to have in the 60s.
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