Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly
By: Tom Berg
Just about everyone with a flower garden welcomes the arrival of those colorful visitors we call butterflies. They come to visit the brightly colored flowers, and we are glad to see them. Although there is a wide variety of beautiful butterflies native to the eastern United States, one of the most stunning and attractive species is the red-spotted purple.
Red-spotted purples are common butterflies which are quite lovely and very hard to forget. They have reddish-orange spots on the tops of their forewings, but the majority of the spots for which they are named are on the undersides of the wings. Their most striking feature though, is the bright iridescent blue coloration on the front side of their hindwings. It is such a bright blue color in the sunlight that you almost have to see it to believe it!
Red-spotted purples inhabit forests, parks, trails and back yards that have plenty of trees and flowers. Adult individuals often feed on rotting fruit, tree sap, dung and mud from mud puddles. They also feed on nectar from flowers like the butterfly bush, meadowsweet, phlox and quite a few others.
Their larvae, or caterpillars, eat the leaves of a variety of trees, including birch, poplar, willow, cottonwood, black oak and wild cherry. These small caterpillars are usually a greenish brown color that is streaked with white. This helps the caterpillar look like a simple bird dropping. Red-spotted purple caterpillars are just one of many caterpillars that mimic bird droppings.
The iridescent blue coloration on the wings of the adults is not just beautiful, it is there for a very good reason. It mimics the coloration of the very poisonous pipevine swallowtail butterfly, and this helps protect them from birds and other predators. The predators are well aware of the toxic nature of butterflies that look like this, so they leave them alone. After all, nobody wants to eat a poisonous bug for lunch!
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