Common Eggfly ButterflyBlue Moon Butterfly
The beautiful male Blue Moon Butterfly (Hypolimnas bolina) is found across several countries from Madagascar to Asia, New Zealand and Australia. Whilst the female of the species can be varied in colour, it is the striking appearance of the male that provides its other common name of the Blue Moon Butterfly.
The territorial males get their name from the two bright blue circular patches against the dark, black wings, that is said to resemble the full ‘blue moon’.
The males are monomorphic (existing in only one form), with black dorsal wing surface featuring three prominent spots, two on the forewing and one on the hindwing. To the human observer, these spots appear as white spots that are fringed with blue-violet. In truth, the spots consist of a white center overlain by bright ultraviolet iridescence. The colour being generated by nanostructures on the wing scale surface. Depending on the surrounding light, and the observers angle of view, the ultraviolet blue iridescence can be prominent to appearing just white.
Images supplied by Dianne Bickers. Photos of the Male Varied Eggfly Butterfly aka Blue Moon Butterfly (Hypolimnas bolina) were taken in southwest Queensland.
— click image to view full screen
- Scientific classification
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Arthropoda
- Class: Insecta
- Order: Lepidoptera
- Family: Nymphalidae
- Genus: Hypolimnas
- Species: H. bolina
- Subspecies:
there are a number of sub-species found around the world including the following two that are also found in Australia
— H. b. bolina
— H. b. nerina - Binomial name: Hypolimnas bolina
Checkout Alice Springs Blue Moon Butterfly and our blog Faces of the Blue Moon…
Footnote & References
- Great Eggfly Hypolimnas bolina, iNaturalistAU, https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/taxa/70174-Hypolimnas-bolina
- Hypolimnas bolina, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypolimnas_bolina (last visited Sept. 8, 2022)
- Researchers witness natural selection at work in dramatic comeback of male butterflies, by Sarah Yang, 12 July 2007, UC Berkeley News, https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/07/12_butterfly.shtml
- The Strange Case of the Butterfly and the Male-Murdering Microbe, by Ed Yong, 20 August 2016, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-strange-case-of-the-butterfly-and-the-male-killer/496637/
Common Eggfly ButterflyBlue Moon Butterfly
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