Lepidoptera Lovers: Butterfly Kisses

Luna moth
Actias luna (Linnaeus, 1758)



Family: Saturniidae
Subfamily: Saturniinae
Identification: Hindwings have long curving tails. Wings are pale green, each with a transparent eyespot. Outer margins are pink in the southern spring brood, yellow in the southern summer brood and in northern populations.

Life History: Adults are very strong fliers and are attracted to lights. Mating takes place after midnight, and egg-laying begins that evening. Females lay eggs in small groups or singly on both surfaces of host plant leaves. The eggs hatch in about one week and the caterpillars are sedentary and solitary feeders. Leaves and silk are used to spin papery brown cocoons in litter under the host plant.

Wing Span: 2 15/16 - 4 1/8 inches (7.5 - 10.5 cm).
Caterpillar Hosts: A variety of trees including white birch (Betula papyrifera), persimmon (Diospyros virginiana), sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), hickories (Carya), walnuts (Juglans), and sumacs (Rhus).

Adult Food: Adults do not feed.
Habitat: Deciduous hardwood forests.
Range: Common. Nova Scotia west to Saskatchewan and eastern North Dakota; south to central Florida, the Gulf Coast, and eastern Texas.

Conservation: Not usually required.

NCGR: G5 - Demonstrably secure globally, though it may be quite rare in parts of its range, especially at the periphery.

Source: Butterflies and Moths of North America org

The images at the website above are many and muy fabuloso! So if you want a real treat, check them out by clicking on the images at the link. It's worth the trip to there. enjoy!

The attached image can be placed on your desktop. Our eyes get tired of seeing the samo-samo, and the free desktop download is here.
 

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Wow, Ernie S. I went to your link above. What an incredible place! Years ago, I visited two Florida butterfly gardens, but nothing as spectacular as your link. I especially enjoyed the virtual tour as well as the store that sells all kinds of seeds to plants butterflies love.
 
And today's butterfly is....

Not sure of the name, but it was posted at the pacific science center. Click on the link or image below to see the full size.

Can anyone share its name?
 

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Purple Mountain Emperor
Graphium weiski

Found in the mountains of New Guinea, the Purple Mountain Emperor is thought to be one of the world's most beautiful butterflies. It is on page 146 of Brian Cassie's A WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES, 2004, Chanticleer Press. This tiny tome has 419 pages and measures about 5x6x1.5", more or less. If you load Graphium weiski into Bing! and click on Images, you will see there are several color variations, all of which are neon and quite beautiful. One source said it is only in the Owen Stanley Mountains of New Guinea, and another states the butterfly is throughout Australis, showing Australia, New Guinea, and several other surrounding islands in the range.
 

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One other coloration I noticed in several of the images is purple, thus the common name, Purple Mountain Butterfly, I guess. It was fun surfing the web for Graphium weiski.
 
[FONT=georgia, bookman old style, palatino linotype, book antiqua, palatino, trebuchet ms, helvetica, garamond, sans-serif, arial, verdana, avante garde, century gothic, comic sans ms, times, times new roman, serif]Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne[/FONT]
 
I was reading around the web about some common flowers butterflies really love:

Yarrow
Aster
Listria
Shasta Daisy
Black-eyed Susan
Scabiosa
Coreopsis
Butterfly Weed
Chives
Catmint
Marigold
Ageratum
milkweed

In case anyone wants to attract butterflies to their gardens or land.
 
Today, I opened my new book, "100 Butterflies" by Harold Feinstein. I noticed a very beautiful picture of White Morpho aka Morpho polyphemus. When I looked online to find one like it, I did and found this page that shows many Morphos, white and blue in color. I'm going to show two whites, (attached thumbnail) Morpho polyphemus, (two attached images,) Morpho catenarius, and one blue, Morpho amathante.

Hope you like them.
 

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I loved Morpho Catenarius of all the white morphos, it had the best details. The website above shows male and female of all the morphos it describes, and I'm including the fremale Morpho Catenarius, and two truly beautiful Blue Morphos, the male and female Morpho cipris.

Again, there are many other truly pretty Morphs here.

This is going to use up my VW free space for images for a week. *sigh*
 

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Last week, a box appeared at the front door. It contained a copy of "Butterflies of the World" by photographer Giles Martin and published by Abrams, New York, translated from the French by Simon Jones with truly amazing photographs by Giles Martin. Needless to mention, it shows the best of the world's butterflies in full living color and proves that even caterpillars can be showy. If you love all aspects of zoology, this would be the one book I'd recommend for you to share your love of the Kingdom of Lepidoptera. Ten percent of all insects belong to this kingdom, made popular by the habit of beautiful butterflies flitting about during the daytime, often going from flower to flower to sip sweet nectar. Actually, they're outnumbered by their nocturnal brethren, the moths, which can be quite pretty in their own right. I couldn't recommend more highly any book for inclusion into the botanist's repetoire of books as well, since so many plants depend on butterflies for pollination in their reproduction cycle, and a threat to a butterfly specie can also end a plant kingdom's member's survival.

Every little thing in nature seems dependent on the act or being of other species. Butterflies add a special dimension to the diversity we enjoy as living beings on this planet. Still planning my next butterfly quilt, too. :)

Link to Amazon who shows a larger picture of the cover and gives background information on the book [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Butterflies-World-Gilles-Martin/dp/0810959534/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1313964224&sr=8-2"]Butterflies of the World[/ame].
 

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This morning, I ran into a truly large specie of Lepidoptera, Thysania agrippina, or the White Witch Moth:

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Apparently it is the widest-winged insect in the world and ranges from Mexico to Central America. I'd appreciate it if anyone who likes entomology and loves the unusual type of insect might confirm this? Thanks.
 
Callophrys rubi was my choice of the green butterflies I looked for today. They're kind of beautiful and wonderful, all rolled into one. Thanks to TrekNature, a great series of pages from all over the world bragging some of the most beautiful scenery, flowers, insects, birds, mammals, and reptiles imaginable.
 
Oh yes, and the green hairstreaks tend to be a bland brown, blackish, or gray color on their top sides.
 
There is a very good introductory page to the Order Lepidoptera at Texas A and M website. The school is located in Bryan, Texas, which is a couple of county hops west of where I live. It has been a grueling summer, and I think it has been very hard on butterflies. It's the hottest, dryest summer Texas has had on record, and the drought here shows our small manmade lake has shrunk almost to the size of a pond, and it was down about 6 feet from its usual height, and an acre less in size than it was this spring. We had an unusually cold winter this past year, but it had a little less rainfall than normal. I wasn't worried until July, when there was less than 10 minutes of rain that fell only one day, and people not far from here got nothing, so it must've just been a little small cloud. It may have saved the only stand of truly tall pines we had left since two years ago in June, a stand of 5 tall pines died after suffering the hottest June on record, and probably too much dry weather that spring of 2009.

Anyway, I'm sorry to report no sightings of butterflies recently, and no pictures as a consequence. Oh, the lovely page on Lepidoptera at TAMU is here, and I'd like to share at least one paragraph that I found helpful on the caterpillar stage of metamorphosis in Lepidoptera:

Immature stages (larvae) are known as caterpillars. Names like cutworms, armyworms, hornworms and many others apply to groups of caterpillars that may be related taxonomically or by similar biology. Their mouthparts are formed for chewing. The well developed head capsule has short antennae. On the front of the face of caterpillars is an groove or suture shaped like an inverted "V." On caterpillars there is a second suture called an adfrontal suture just under the "V." Almost all have crochets (small hooks) on the prolegs even if the prolegs are reduced. These hooks help the caterpillar hold onto the substrate. Caterpillars feed on foliage, stored products, linens. Some are leafminers and a few are borers in herbaceous and woody plants.
Most Lepidoptera feed on leaves of plants in the larval stage. Some caterpillars bore in plant stems, others are leafminers and a few are ever predators. All Lepidoptera have complete metamorphosis. Microlepidoptera are often under 1/4 inch, the largest moths and butterflies are over 3 inches.

Hope you will read the page listed. Butterflies are much fun, and there's a link on the page that takes you through individuals in Lepidoptera, both common and scientific names, foods the specie likes, pictures of stages of metamorphosis, a description, life cycles, and whether it is a pest to certain crops or not. Enjoy the page and its door-opening links. :)
 
Fabriholics collect fabrics of their favorite things... :)
 

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Yesterday, I noticed a swarm of teeny tiny butterflies around a weed out in the pasture and was most amused. So often you see only one or two butterflies flitting about, but this was too much in a square yard, there were maybe 30 of the miniature creatures flitting from blossom to blossom but having just as much fun as their larger brethren.

Dainty Sulphur
Nathalis iole

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I know so little of butterflies, but I thought it was so special to see the little chartreuse-winged cuties having the time of their lives yesterday.
A little more on the Dainty Sulphur is here. Their wings were the size of my small finger's nail, 7mm x 9mm, less than an inch across the pair (give or take a few mms. They made my trip to the field a totally happy experience.

This year for the drought, we had to mow down everything due to the threat of fire, and the butterflies responded by not showing up except close to the lake. A couple of days after a night rain, the Dainty Sulphurs showed up. What a joy they were. There is a small meadow at the back of our land between the fence and a seasonal creek, where deer like to stay (you can see their hollowed-out resting areas in the day hours), and we left it strictly alone because it's so small) Hopefully butterflies had at least a corner of the world to call their own most of the time so all the butterflies will come back next year.

This is our third summer season that just passed, and next year I'm mowing avenues through the fields only. Something came up from areas we tilled for the garden, and at first, I thought the plants were milkweed. I'm not for sure, but what came up could be known as Jimson weed, which I think is a noxious weed. At this point, I'm rethinking noxious because butterflies in any given area tend to be fond of what grows there with no prompting.

I'm not a hundred percent sure the above butterfly is what I was seeing, but if that changes, I'll come back with the corrected specie. They seemed a lot more on the sulphur than the green side, but maybe it was a couple of days ago and the memory is not as clear as when I first took a deep breath on the sight of the cheerful little beasties.
 
My bad!!!

The Dainty Sulphur is described here. It's not the specie I saw that was so tiny. The Dainty Sulphur is 3 inches across, not 10 or 12 mm.

When I searched for "tiny Texas butterfly" I never dreamed I'd be reading about a 3" wingspan creature, since many truly beautiful butterflies of our meadows are 2" across, and while small, I'd not call them tiny. So much for perception between me and others! lol
 
Butterflies are always so pretty. Just thinking the differences of butterflies in every countries.
 

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