Plantain butterfly
| Plantain butterfly | ||||||||||||
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Plantain-Scheckenfalter ( Melitaea cinxia ) |
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| Melitaea cinxia | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
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The plantain butterfly ( Melitaea cinxia ) is a butterfly from the noble butterfly family (Nymphalidae). The specific epithet is derived from Cinxia , an epithet of Juno from Greek mythology .
features
The moths reach a wingspan of 33 to 40 millimeters. They have yellow-brown to orange-brown wing tops, which are drawn with a black grid pattern. The outer edge of the wings is white. Near the rear edge of the hind wings there are four to five orange fields with a black core. The undersides of the hind wings are white with two broad, orange cross bars. The bandages are framed in black and there are also numerous black spots in the white areas in between. On the back band, as on the front, the orange areas are cored black.
Plantain butterfly
△ Plantain butterfly
Caterpillar
The caterpillars are about 25 millimeters long and have numerous, short, black thorns. They are almost completely black in color and have a few white points arranged in cross rows. Your head is red.
Occurrence
The animals live in almost all of Europe , except in the north and parts of the Iberian Peninsula , parts of northwest Africa, Turkey , Russia , northern Kazakhstan and Mongolia . In Europe you can find them up to an altitude of 2000 m, in North Africa even up to 2600 m. In Germany they are still found in some low mountain ranges and warm places in the Alps , but were also found in 2008 in a short rotation plantation in Cahnsdorf in Brandenburg . They live in open and arid areas, such as B. dry grass , rough meadows , wasteland and also on the edges of forests . In the past, this species was one of the most common and ubiquitous. However, they are now rare almost everywhere and are classified as endangered.
Way of life
The moths love warmth and like to sunbathe while sitting on the ground. They fly annually in one generation, depending on the region, from the end of April to the beginning of August, but in the south or warm areas they also fly in two from May to June and from August to September.
Food of the caterpillars
The caterpillars feed primarily on ribwort ( Plantago lanceolata ) and other plantain species , but also great speedwell ( Veronica teucrium ), hawkweed ( Hieracium pilosella ) and knapweed ( Centaurea jacea ).
development
The females lay their eggs in multilayered piles on the underside of the forage plants. The caterpillars that hatch from it live gregariously in a web and hibernate in it as an adolescent. After hibernating, they are soon fully grown and then live solitary. They pupate in April or May near the ground in a gray tumbler spun in a loose web that has several light spots on the back.
swell
Individual evidence
- ^ Arnold Spuler: The butterflies of Europe . tape 1 . E. Schweitzerbartsche Verlagbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1908, p. 22 .
- ↑ a b c d e Heiko Bellmann : The new cosmos butterfly guide. Butterflies, caterpillars and forage plants. Franckh-Kosmos, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-440-09330-1 , p. 182.
- ↑ a b Tom Tolman, Richard Lewington: Die Tagfalter Europäische und Nordwestafrikas , p. 164f, Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-440-07573-7
- ↑ Ulrich Schulz, Oliver Brauner, Holger Greeting, Claudia Mannherz: Zoodiversität. Promotion of the fauna on short rotation plantations. In: Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (Ed.): Kurzumtriebsplantagen. Recommendations for action for the environmentally friendly production of energy wood in agriculture , 2010, Osnabrück.
literature
- Günter Ebert (Ed.): The butterflies of Baden-Württemberg Volume 1, Tagfalter I (Knight butterflies (Papilionidae), Weißlinge (Pieridae), Edelfalter (Nymphalidae)), Ulmer Verlag Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-800-13451-9
- Josef Settele, Roland Steiner, Rolf Reinhardt, Reinart Feldmann: Butterflies. The butterflies of Germany. Eugen Ulmer KG, 2005, ISBN 3-800-14167-1
