Yellow Coster emerging

Identification - heliconiinae Acraea issoria.

You may remember the chrysalis blip from eight days ago, which triggered an exercise of downloading images of caterpillars, pupae and eggs for every butterfly that I had ID's for. At the end of the mammoth task, I really was none the wiser, as it did not match any of my butterflies, but during my search it did closely resemble the pupae of Acraea violae.

Every day since, I have been keeping an eye on the chrysalis just on the off chance that I might get lucky. I really didn't want to take it home for observation, although perhaps next time, this would be a better option.

Well, today I did get lucky and found the emerged butterfly hanging out to dry. The angle was not good, so I had to hold the leaf with one hand to get the image.

After all my preparation work, ID was a breeze having already identified the family. It was the next species over and yet another new species for my collection.

The butterfly has a monarch look about it, particularly the common tiger which is the local relative of the monarch. Reading on about the heliconiinae family, they are known as mimics of other butterfly species. The monarch is a useful butterfly to mimic, as it tastes foul and is poisonous to most predators.

A good blip day :)

Dave