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Project Noah Nature School
Catopsilia pyranthe
The four larger whitish butterflies are mottled emigrants. While the smaller yellowish ones at the right and left are Three-Spot Grass Yellow (Eurema blanda)
this type of butterfly congregations are quite common. It is called MUD PUDDLING. The behavior is common among the males of the butterfly species and it is done in order to obtain salts, minerals and amino acids from the soil necessary for their metabolism. this one was on the banks of a stream among forest area.
Hi Malcolm Wilton Jones, Thank you for informing me regarding the importance of one upload - one species thing. I understand and have edited this to one species name and have named the other in the description part. :) Cheers.
While we are happy to accept multiple species spottings along with their interesting stories, being a database program which runs off reports, the scientific name field is our prime species identifier and we ask that the scientific name field concentrates on a single species showing just the Genus + species of that species. Ideally a second spotting can be made for each of any other species noted in the spotting as this will increase the species counts and make them more accurate. Where this is done you make cross references to the other species in the notes section.
Chime.. actually here is no Clodeless sulpher... I think you wiped wrong Yellow Grass butterfly ID.
@ Ashish, that was spot on ID. :) name promptly changed to mottled emigrant.
I see here Mottled Emigrant (Catopsilia pyranthe) butterflies.
http://www.learnaboutbutterflies.com/Ind...
:) even i heard about mud puddling just now from karenL. :) this is a nice site to learn many things. And all you people are very resourceful. thank you KarenL and CherreyMaePanchoBartolata.
ok that explains it all.... pale greenish is male and heavily yellow is female of the cloudless sulphur... ;)
another cloudless sulfurs mating http://bugguide.net/node/view/147566 pale green and yellow
:) did you read that mud puddling behavior is mostly observed in male butterflies ??? Maybe cloudless sulphur females are special. ;)
and oh look, they might all be cloudless sulfur, males and females http://www.rlephoto.com/sulphurs/sulphur... look at the 3rd photo in that page, mating Cloudless sulphur, exactly those above! :-) I may have the sexes the other way around. "very pale greenish male
and a very fresh heavily marked female. " according to that page
I think the pale greens are females.. http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflie...
oh u are talking about the big ones !!! :) i don't know, they look bit whitish or pale greenish to me, but nowhere near yellowish. and i don't know if cloudless sulphurs are common in india. :)
yes, the yellow one, you're right about that Three-Spot Grass Yellow.. the greenish one, that's what I meant as the cloudless sulfur.. they seem to go from pale green/yellowish..
@ CherreyMaePanchoBartolata,,, is it really cloudles sulphur ? did you check the Three-Spot Grass Yellow , (Eurema blanda).
This is great. It is cold now here in the hills of the Poconos, but I saw a Yellow Sulfur flying around still as it was sunny and low 50's. WOW. I have to still post mine.
Spotted on Nov 19, 2011
Submitted on Nov 19, 2011
