Julia Butterfly

by Robert Bales

Title

Julia 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.
Butterfly cocoons of many different kinds are shipped Fed Ex from Costa Rica to Boise, where they hatch at the Zoo. There are up to 500 butterflies in the enclosure at any given time.

Dryas iulia (often incorrectly spelled julia), commonly called the Julia Butterfly, Julia Heliconian, The Flame, or Flambeau, is a species of brush-footed butterfly. The sole representative of its genus Dryas, it is native from Brazil to southern Texas and Florida, and in summer can sometimes be found as far north as eastern Nebraska. Over 15 subspecies have been described.

Two Julia Butterflies drinking tears from turtles in Ecuador
Its wingspan ranges from 82 to 92 mm, and it is colored orange (brighter in male specimens) with black markings; this species is somewhat unpalatable to birds and belongs to the "orange" Batesian Mimicry mimic complex.

This butterfly is a fast flier and frequents clearings, paths, and margins of forests and woodlands. It feeds on the nectar of flowers, such as lantanas (Lantana) and Shepherd's-needle (Scandix pecten-veneris), and the tears of caiman, the eye of which the butterfly irritates to produce tears.[3] Its caterpillar feeds on leaves of passion vines including Passiflora affinis and Yellow Passionflower (P. lutea) in Texas.

The species is popular in butterfly houses because it is long-lived and active throughout the day.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uploaded

July 7th, 2016

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Viewed 1,703 Times  -  Last Visitor from Yuma, AZ on 04/23/2024 at 9:33 AM

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