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| Insects of Britain and Ireland: butterflies |
Adults. Wingspan 31–46 mm; the fringes conspicuously light-and-dark banded. Short-bodied to medium-bodied; small-headed. The eyes not white-rimmed. The head and antennae not rosy-tinged. Antennae reaching noticeably less than halfway to the wingtips; inserted markedly less than one half the width of the head apart. Labial palps ascending.
Forewings. Forewings apically blunt. The outer margins more or less straight. Uppersides of the forewings white; not conspicuously dark-veined; with a conspicuous discal mark; with an apical blackish blotch reaching the mid-termen which encloses white spots, and a large black discal spot, with blackish suffusion extending along the costa.
Hindwings. Hindwings broadly rounded; with the outer margins not scalloped. Uppersides of the hindwings white; conspicuously patterned; without a discal mark; white, patterned in grey by transmission from the underside.
Undersides of wings. Undersides of the forewings patterned like the uppersides, but the apical blotch greenish instead of blackish.
Undersides of the hindwings greenish with blackish suffusion, and dappled with white - cf. Anthocharis and Pontia; without a discal mark.
Wing venation. Forewings without basally dilated veins. “The subcostal nervure 5-branched” (Kirby).
Eggs, larvae, pupae. On Cruciferae.
Pupae boat-shaped; exposed, with no coccoon.
British representation. 1 species. Euchloë simplonia. The adults abroad June to August (?).
Status in Britain. Rare ocurrence representing occasional, genuine immigrants, or adventive (?).
Distribution. Southeast England, central southern England, southwest England (?). Frequenting open places. Habitats calcareous and non-calcareous.
Comments. L.W. remains confused re application of the names E. ausonia, E. crameri and E. simplonia to supposedly British specimens. Even the differences between imagines of Dappled Whites (Euchloë) and the Bath White (Pontia daplidice, q.v.) are unclear from works which lack keys.
Classification. Superfamily Papilionoidea. Pieridae.
Illustrations. • Euchloë simplonia (Dappled White: photos). Euchloë (?)simplonia (Dappled White). The material photographed is tentatively referable to E. simplonia, a European vagrant/migrant species with dubious claims to inclusion as 'British'. However, the Euchloë species currently recognised by taxonomists may be indistinguishable as adults, necessitating undue reliance on geography for identification.
Le Crau, Arles, SE France, June 4th 1950 (J. Armitage). From Watson’s collection. • Euchloë simplonia (Dappled White: Kirby, 1907).
We advise against extracting comparative information from the descriptions. This is much more easily achieved using the DELTA data files or the interactive key, which allows access to the character list, illustrations, full and partial descriptions, diagnostic descriptions, differences and similarities between taxa, lists of taxa exhibiting or lacking specified attributes, and distributions of character states within any set of taxa. See also Guidelines for using data taken from Web publications.
Cite this publication as: ‘Watson, L., and Dallwitz, M.J. 2008 onwards. Insects of Britain and Ireland: butterflies. Version: 27th July 2019. delta-intkey.com’.
