Banded Orange Heliconian Butterfly

by Robert Bales

Title

Banded Orange Heliconian Butterfly

Artist

Robert Bales

Medium

Photograph - Photo

Description

One of the many butterflies at the Boise Zoo Butterflies Bloom Exhibit . It is a great place to view many different types of butterflies. You can walk through a greenhouse-like mesh enclosure with hundreds of butterflies. Zoo Boise Director Steve Burns says the butterflies come from Costa Rica. It gives the farmers in that area the opportunity to make money off of the forests rather than have to cut it down and ranch it so it is a great way for those folks to keep the rainforests intact and still make money for their families.

Dryadula is a monotypic genus of the butterfly family Nymphalidae. Its single species, Dryadula phaetusa, known as the banded orange heliconian, banded orange, or orange tiger, is native from Brazil to central Mexico, and in summer can be found rarely as far north as central Florida. Its wingspan ranges from 86 to 89 mm, and it is colored a bright orange with thick black stripes in males and a duller orange with fuzzier black stripes in females.
It feeds primarily on the nectar of flowers and on bird droppings; its caterpillar feeds on passion vines including Passiflora tetrastylis. It is generally found in lowland tropical fields and valleys.
This species is unpalatable to birds and belongs to the "orange" Batesian mimicry complex.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uploaded

July 8th, 2016

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Viewed 1,281 Times  -  Last Visitor from Ottawa, ON - Canada on 04/23/2024 at 3:57 PM

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