I found this tiny little guy on my Carambola tree. It's only about .75 to 1.0 inches overall. It's white below (ventral) with brownish spots and you can see the two small orange rimmed blue eye-spots. What I couldn't get a picture of is the top (dorsal) view which is purplish-blue! One of their larval food is Plumbago which is over used and found in almost every garden here. They also like Wild Tamarind, Leadwort, Blackbead and Milk Peas et al.
The Cassius Blue is abundant throughout south Florida but occasionally disperses northward beyond the state's border. Many of these isolated records, however, may be the result of immature stages of the butterfly "piggybacking" on shipments of the popular landscape plant, Plumbago, to various commercial nurseries.
excerpt from 'Butterflies of Florida Field Guide' by Jaret C. Daniels
Cassius Blue by Eric Bronson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.flickr.com
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Cassius Blue Leptotes cassius
Posted by Eric Bronson at 6:54 AM
Labels: butterfly, lycaenidae
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1 comments:
A lovely find of this beautiful butterfly; does it not make gardening richer thank to all the critters and creatures and whatnot is around to observe and marvel about.
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