Power Multiplied

Strategies for Survival

I missed my chat with you last week--my apologies. I was up in Costa Rica's Cloud Forest being entranced by what I saw. This intriguing diaphanous butterfly was one such thing. None of the creatures in the Power Rising series are very well camouflaged, which leads to plenty of captures and evasions and injuries. This little butterfly has developed a clever camouflage--a predator looking its way sees mostly just the leaf there, and moves on. Good thing too, for a butterfly only lives for a day--it emerges from a chrysalis where its caterpillar had dissolved into a gelatinous goo and miraculously re-forms into a creature like this one, which must, if it is female, mate and find the one kind of leaf that her caterpillars will be able to eat when they hatch. She lays her eggs on that special leaf, flits around, and then she is done. Seems quite unfair to me.The protagonist of the Power Rising series often thought she was only going to last a day, because she found herself in such terrible straits. But she fights to live, a choice this little butterfly doesn't have. Maybe that's the strategy for survival humans have developed instead of camouflage--an indomitable will to find a way through, and a powerful love of life.