Melitaea didyma

Melitaea didyma, the spotted fritillary or red-band fritillary, is a butterfly of the family Nymphalidae.

For the plant called the spotted fritillary, see Fritillaria atropurpurea.

Melitaea didyma
both in the Republic of North Macedonia
Scientific classification
Kingdom:
Animalia
Phylum:
Arthropoda
Class:
Insecta
Order:
Lepidoptera
Family:
Nymphalidae
Genus:
Melitaea
Species:
M. didyma
Binomial name
Melitaea didyma
(Esper, 1778)[1]
Subspecies

See text

Description

Melitaea didyma is a medium-sized butterfly with a wingspan reaching 35–50 millimetres (1.4–2.0 in). The overside of the wings is a bright orange-brown with dark brown markings arranged in rows, which are quite variable in quantity and size. Sometimes the colour of the females is a duller orange, shaded with grey-green. The underside of the wings is chequered pale yellow and pale orange. M. didyma has seasonal forms and sexual dimorphism. The male is fiery red, with a narrow dentate black distal border and a moderate number of small black dots and spots, which are dispersed over the basal half of the wing and end with a short band extending beyond the cell from the costa into the disc. On the underside, which is very abundantly marked with small black dots and hooks, a flexuose subbasal band and a curved submarginal one are situated on a delicately greenish, or yellowish, white ground. In the female the forewing and the anal area of the hindwing are much paler, being moreover dusted with blackish, while the costal half of the hindwing has preserved the red tint : the whole wings are much more abundantly but less prominently marked with black.There occur sometimes specimens with a blue gloss on the upperside [2].

Biology

This butterfly flies from March to October depending on the location. This species has two or three generations and overwinters as young caterpillar.

The larvae feed on various plants, including Linaria, Plantago lanceolata, Veronica, Centaurea jacea and Digitalis purpurea.[3]

  • Male
  • Male underside
  • Female
  • Female underside

Distribution

It is found in southern and central Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, central Asia and Siberia. It is absent from northern Europe (England, Ireland, northern France, Germany, Poland and Scandinavia).[3]

Habitat

Melitaea didyma prefers flowery and grassy areas, meadows and roadsides.

Subspecies

The species is divided into the following subspecies:[3]

  • Melitaea didyma didyma
  • Melitaea didyma elavar Fruhstorfer, 1917
  • Melitaea didyma kirgisica Bryk, 1940
  • Melitaea didyma neera Fischer de Waldheim, 1840
  • Melitaea didyma occidentalis Staudinger, 1861
  • Melitaea didyma turkestanica Sheljuzhko, 1929
  • Melitaea didyma ambra Higgings, 1941

Images of life cycle
  • Mating
  • Larva (or caterpillar)
  • Pupa (or chrysalis)
gollark: Oh, so you mean this `hdr` goes at the start and the `dofs` thing tells you where the bit appended to the end is?
gollark: Perhaps the headers should also store the location of the last header, in case of [DATA EXPUNGED].
gollark: There are some important considerations here: it should be able to deal with damaged/partial files, encryption would be nice to have (it would probably work to just run it through authenticated AES-whatever when writing), adding new files shouldn't require tons of seeking, and it might be necessary to store backups on FAT32 disks so maybe it needs to be able of using multiple files somehow.
gollark: Hmm, so, designoidal idea:- files have the following metadata: filename, last modified time, maybe permissions (I may not actually need this), size, checksum, flags (in case I need this later; probably just compression format?)- each version of a file in an archive has this metadata in front of it- when all the files in some set of data are archived, a header gets written to the end with all the file metadata plus positions- when backup is rerun, the system™ just checks the last modified time of everything and sees if its local copies are newer, and if so appends them to the end; when it is done a new header is added containing all the files- when a backup needs to be extracted, it just reads the end and decompresses stuff at the right offset
gollark: I don't know what you mean "dofs", data offsets?

References
  1. Biolib
  2. Seitz. A. in Seitz, A. ed. Band 1: Abt. 1, Die Großschmetterlinge des palaearktischen Faunengebietes, Die palaearktischen Tagfalter, 1909, 379 Seiten, mit 89 kolorierten Tafeln (3470 Figuren) This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  3. "Melitaea Fabricius, 1807" at Markku Savela's Lepidoptera and Some Other Life Forms


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.