Yukie Ota is a Japanese flutist who is trying to break into the music business. Her big chance came at the Carl Nielsen International Flute Competition in Odense, Denmark. During the first round of the competition, Ota's performance was going well.
Then a butterfly landed on her face and crawled around.
Ota briefly glanced up at it, but never dropped a note. She passed the first round of the competition.
NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas dug up some information about the butterfly:
I asked Dr. Bob Robbins, curator of lepidoptera at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, what the butterfly was doing there. Was it attracted by the lights? Something on her skin? Just the fluttery sound of her flute?
After taking a look at the video, Robbins told me that this was an Aglais io, or a Peacock butterfly, which is a very common species in Europe. He noted that it is "very weird" for a butterfly to come indoors like this, and that when butterflies land on people, it's usually because they are looking for salty water to drink.
"If you look closely at the video," he says, "you can see the butterfly's proboscis — its 'tongue' — out as it crawls across her forehead. It's looking for her perspiration. And she's under lights at a highfalutin competition. I'd be sweating a bit under that pressure."
-via The Presurfer