Reference photo of a pinned Colobura dirce specimen, upper side

Reference photo

Photo: Yale Peabody Museum; photo by Paul Shamble 2011 · Yale Peabody Museum (Entomology) · CC0 1.0 (cropped and resized). Not the specimen in Lucy’s drawer.

Tray 19 of 39

Colobura dirce

(Linnaeus, 1758)

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Your framed specimen is a different individual of the same species, chosen and mounted by Lucy.

  • Nymphalidae
  • Butterfly
For young explorers

Its caterpillars eat the leaves of Cecropia trees.

Its caterpillars feed on the young leaves of Cecropia trees, living alone or in small groups.

Catalog label
Family
Nymphalidae
Subfamily
Nymphalinae
Tribe
Nymphalini
Where it lives
Central America, South America

From the catalog of Lucy Garcia Salik, PhD. A mounted specimen from a licensed supplier.

Research notes

From published sources, not from Lucy’s catalog. Each note lists where it came from.

Where it lives

This butterfly is native to the tropical Americas. Butterflies of America gives the range of the mainland subspecies as running from both the eastern and western sides of Mexico south to Argentina. It also lists a separate subspecies on the larger Caribbean islands: Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. The Florida Museum describes the species as native to Central and South America. The BAMONA regional checklist for El Salvador includes it under the name Dirce Beauty. Other common names in museum sources are mosaic and zebra mosaic.

Habitat

This butterfly is closely tied to Cecropia trees, because that is where its caterpillars feed. Observations of the young stages on Cecropia come from Costa Rican forest sites. A Florida Museum article notes that the butterfly and the Cecropia trees it depends on have similarly broad distributions across the American tropics. The same museum also calls the mosaic a woodland butterfly.

Life cycle

Overview: The life cycle runs egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult. Photo records show eggs on Cecropia leaves. The caterpillar is velvety black with rows of bright yellow branched spines. In this species it also has pale cream teardrop-shaped marks along its body. One recorded caterpillar habit is cutting the veins of a leaf so the leaf droops down over it like a small umbrella shelter. After the caterpillar stage comes a resting stage before it becomes a chrysalis, and the adult butterfly comes out of the chrysalis. Field records from Costa Rica also show that tachinid flies attack the young stages.

Look-alikes

One clue is a gray band on the underside of the front wing. In C. dirce this band widens slightly and stops short of the yellow crosswise band. In C. annulata the band stays the same width and reaches the yellow band. The caterpillars are easier to tell apart: C. dirce caterpillars have cream teardrop marks, and the caterpillars of the newest species have no cream marks at all. Butterflies of America lists C. annulata from southern Mexico to western Ecuador, and from Venezuela to Bolivia, the Guianas and Trinidad. That range overlaps with C. dirce, and BAMONA checklists include both species.

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