Sunday, October 11, 2009

Hackberry Emperor

I posted this picture about a month back with the wrong identification, no thanks to the butterfly books I had. I couldn't find it anywhere, which is sad because it's apparently very common since one of its favorite foods (and name-sake) is here in Texas.
It looks a lot like a painted lady, but isn't. There's only one reason I found out what it is and that is... I found the name of the tree it's sitting on. When I googled the name of the tree to cross reference my hope that I had finally found out the name of this kind of tree (two months I have been trying, two months), the first picture was not of leaves it was of this oddly familiar looking butterfly.
It appears to be the southern Texas variety as shown by the three spots on the forewing. It used to be considered its own species "Empress Antonia" but now it's just a sub-species. The regular kind only have one main spot on the forewing.
It's a Hackberry Emperor butterfly. It's rather similar in appearance to the Painted Ladies, but a little less vibrant and with more eyes. The underside of it's wings is marbled brown with seven blue eyes on the back wing and one or three eyes on the forewing.
The top of the wings has the forewings tipped in dark brown which is edged in white dots. There are two little fingers coming down from the top of the wings as well. It's mostly orange-brown and the eyes show through from the bottom as black dots.
It has fishy looking eyes and fuzzy underbody. And one interesting thing I just found out is that their antenna have little dark bands all down the length of them.

That's it. Not a Lady, but an Emperor!

No comments:

Post a Comment