Blue Tiger

Tirumala limniace

The Blue Tiger is a butterfly found in India that belongs to the crows and tigers, that is, the danaid group of the brush-footed butterfly family. This butterfly shows gregarious migratory behaviour in southern India.
Blue Tiger  Geotagged,Marbled White,Melanargia galathea,United Kingdom

Appearance

Upperside black, with bluish-white semihyaline spots and streaks. Fore wing: interspace 1 two streaks, sometimes coalescent, with a spot beyond cell: a streak from base and an outwardly indented spot at its apex; a large oval spot at base of interspace 2, another at base of interspace 3, with a smaller spot beyond it towards termen; five obliquely placed preapical streaks, and somewhat irregular subterminal and terminal series of spots, the latter the smaller. Hind wing: interspaces 1b, 1a, and 1 with streaks from base, double in the latter two, cell with a forked broad streak, the lower branch with a hook, or spur-like slender loop, at base of 4 and 5 a broad elongate streak, and at base of 6 a quadrate spot; beyond these again a number of scattered unequal subterminal and terminal spots.

Underside: basal two-thirds of fore wing dusky black, the apex and hind wing olive-brown; the spots and streaks much as on the upperside, Antennae, head and thorax black, the latter two spotted and streaked with, white; abdomen dusky above, ochraceous spotted with white beneath. Male secondary sex-mark in form 1.


Expanse: 98–106 mm
LIFE IN NECTOR GREEN LOVE Blue Tiger,Geotagged,India,Tirumala limniace

Reproduction

Yellowish white; 3rd and 12th segments, each with a pair of fleshy filaments, black and greenish white; each of the segments with four transverse black bars, the second bar on all broader than the others, bifurcated laterally, a yellow longitudinal line on each side; head, feet and claspers spotted with black. The larva is around 1.21 centimetres in length and weighs around 5 milligrams initially, but grows double that size and four times that weight within 48 hours.
angry butterfly  Blue Tiger,Tirumala limniace

Food

The butterfly larva generally feed on plants of family Asclepiadaceae. The recorded host plants are:
⤷  ''Asclepias''
⤷  ''Calotropis''
⤷  ''Heterostemma''
⤷  ''Marsdenia''
⤷  ''Dregea volubilis''
⤷  ''Heterostemma cuspidatum''
⤷  ''Hoya viridiflora''
⤷  ''Marsdenia tenacissima''
⤷  ''Crotalaria'' spp.
⤷  ''Epibaterium'' spp.
⤷  Soya

References:

Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.

Taxonomy
KingdomAnimalia
DivisionArthropoda
ClassInsecta
OrderLepidoptera
FamilyNymphalidae
GenusTirumala
SpeciesT. limniace