Bellona metalmark (Necyria bellona)

Bellona Metalmark on a wet street in the morning This is a beautiful red, black, & blue butterfly that we saw on our "Street Birding Walk" on a warm and sunny morning after a lot of rain. Bellona metalmark,Ecuador,Geotagged,Necyria bellona,San Isidro,Summer

Appearance

"Necyria bellona" has a wingspan of 30–40 mm. Body is rather slender. Wings are deep black, more or less glossed, with metallic bright red spots or curved red and glossy blue bands.

Bellona metalmark, La Planada Nature Reserve, Colombia On this very rainy day at La Planada Nature Reserve, we had trouble enough to protect the tele setup from drowning, so we did not bother with carrying around a second camera body with a macro setup. Instead, we just used our smartphone to pick up some butterflies along the way. There's several open paths in this reserve where you occasionally find some clusters of them.

Although I'm a bit of a gear freak, this approach works reasonably well. Butterflies are large enough to not really require a 1:1 magnification. In this case, the 2x lens on my smartphone also came in handy as I could do this from *some* distance to not disturb the butterfly. And finally, another advantage is that I don't have to worry about focus or depth of field, due to the tiny sensor, everything is in focus by default. Bellona metalmark,Colombia,Colombia 2018,Colombia South,Fall,Geotagged,La Planada Nature Reserve,Necyria bellona,South America

Naming

The following subspecies are recognised:
⤷ "N. b. bellona"
⤷ "N. b. saundersii"
⤷ "N. b. manco"
⤷ "N. b. juturna"
⤷ "N. b. westwoodi"
⤷ "N. b. whitelyiana"
⤷ "N. b. zaneta"
⤷ "N. b. gerhardi"
⤷ "N. b. ahrenholzi"

References:

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Taxonomy
Kingdom	Animalia
Division	Arthropoda
Class	Insecta
Order	Lepidoptera
Family	Riodinidae
Genus	Necyria
Species	N. bellona

Photographed in
Colombia
Ecuador
Peru