#acraea

[herpsandbirds]

Red Clearwing or Red Glassy Acraea (Acraea lia), family Nymphalidae, Madagascar

photograph by Jean Christophe

[drhoz]

#1489 - Acraea terpsicore - Tawny Coster

Photo by Tim Howell, in Collinsville, Queensland. He tried to ID it from his Australian butterfly books, but if they were published before 2012 he would have been shit out of luck, since they only started showing up around Darwin in the Northern Territory that year. Since then they’ve spread rapidly, and are now well into Queensland.

Tawny Costers are native to India, Sri Lanka and SE Asia, but over the last decade they’ve made some long-distance jumps and established themselves here and elsewhere. It’s not clear why they only did this so recently, since their diet is quite wide and it’s not like needed a particularly foodplant to be available first.

Foodplants include some extremely toxic species, and they sequester the poison as caterpillars, and advertise the fact as adults. Orange and black colouration is quite widespread among poisonous and unpalatable butterflies, so it probably didn’t take long for local predators to catch on.

[animals-animals-animals]

Natal Acraea (Acraea natalica) (by berniedup)