why is it that flowers which attract moths and butterflies mostly smell sweet? why are these insects attracted by a sweet smell? flies are attracted to stench because the smell promises a breeding ground and food, but how about butterflies? flies associate stench with breeding ground because a rotting piece of meat produces a stench, and to the fly the meat is food and a place to breed. but to a butterfly, why did it associate sweet smell with sweet nectar from flowers? perhaps in the end it is all just olfactory.

why the random post above? simply cos i thought of that question earlier on.

another intriguing observation: why is it alocasia and amorphophallus leaves curl downwards in the direction the catipillar is leaning and eating? firstly, i doubt it is the weight of the catipillar because the curl downwards is too much to have been cause by weight alone. and secondly, the curling downwards seems to occur in less than a day, suggesting that the process of bending over is relatively quick, and also because the catipillar still had not finished its meal, suggesting that the leaf curled fast, because catipillars eat rather fast. is the curling induced by mechanical or chemical means, or a combination of both? is there a logical reason for the stem curling? and is this observation limited to the type of catipillar and the type of plant, in this case 2 genera from the araceae family? this observations do happen from time to time, but why is it that it doesnt happen 100%? out of the many catipillar attacks, only a minor few cause the above phenomenon. what makes these few catipillars so special? who knows....