Common Lime

Description:

Papilionidae; Papilioninae; Papilionini; Papilio demoleus demoleus Linnaeus, 1758. This P. d. demoleus is quite tattered and has lost much of the Tornus area of the left hind wing. It is, however, a fresh and pristine looking specimen in all other respects and this leads me to think it probably eclosed that morning. The damage was almost certainly caused by the strong, blustery winds we have at this time of year which cause butterflies to "crash land" sometimes on their target plants. Because of the damage, and the fact that I did not manage a "full-open wing" (or even a "full-closed wing") photo results in my being unable to be certain if it is a male or a female. If I had to guess, I would go for a male, based on what I can see of the remainder of the rear left wing upper surface markings. In my last spotting of a Common Lime - https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12... - I mentioned that all of the pictures of this species, that I could view on reliable websites, displayed the ground colour of the wings as black, but my specimen on that spotting was obviously brown. I could not find any explanation for this and wondered if it might have been due to a loss of scales because that specimen was in poor condition. Then, after I had uploaded the spotting, I thought that if that were the case, then the other colours should also have been affected and that was not so. Then, today, I saw on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papilio_de... - a close-up photo of the red tornal spots on a black background specimen and, next to it a picture of "an older adult with orange spots". The background colour of the "older adult" was not mentioned, but it was undeniably brown, not black ! So, I think my rhetorical question has been answered. On older adults, the red tornal spots become orange and the black background becomes brown. At least that is clearly what you can see if you look at Wiki's photos at the bottom of the Description section. As they say here in the Philippines "Ay, salamat !" in English, something like "Thank goodness for that !"

Habitat:

This beautiful, if slightly tattered, butterfly was spotted visiting flowers in our front yard in windy conditions during a brief interval between heavy rain showers.