| Yellow Swift (previously known as Baoris impar) HESPERIINAE, HESPERIIDAE, HESPERIOIDEA | (donherbisonevans@yahoo.com) and Stella Crossley |
(Photo: by C.E. Meyer,
courtesy of
The Australian Entomologist)
|
| Yellow Swift (previously known as Baoris impar) HESPERIINAE, HESPERIIDAE, HESPERIOIDEA | (donherbisonevans@yahoo.com) and Stella Crossley |
(Photo: by C.E. Meyer,
courtesy of
The Australian Entomologist)
This Caterpillar is cream with a lot of little green spots all over. It has a green line along the back edged with cream. The head is fawn with red and white stripes. It feeds at night on various plants from the Grass family ( POACEAE ), including :
The Caterpillar hides by day in a shelter made from a rolled leaf of its foodplant, and grows to a length of about 4 cms.
In due course it pupates in an open cylindrical shelter on a dense pad of silk. The pupa is green with a horn on its head. The pupa has a length of about 3 cms.
The adult butterfly is dark brown, with a sparse submarginal row of spots shading from white along the margin of the fore wing to yellow along the margin of the hind wing. The wing span is 3 to 4 cms. The undersides are similar to the upper surfaces but paler.
Various subspecies are found in south-west Pacific, including and
The subspecies lavinia (Waterhouse, 1932), and tetragraphus (Mabille, 1891) have been recognised in Australia in
Further reading :
Paul Mabille,
Description d'Hespéries,,
Bulletin de la Société Entomologique de Belgique,
Volume 27 (1883), pp. LXVI-LXVII.
C.E. Meyer,
The Life History of
Borbo impar lavinia (Waterhouse)
(Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae),
The Australian Entomologist,
Volume 24, part 2 (September 1997), pp. 78-80.
Michael F. Braby,
Butterflies of Australia,
CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne 2000, vol. 1, pp. 245-246.
 caterpillar |  butterflies |  Lepidoptera |  moths |  caterpillar |
(updated 28 October 2009, 22 September 2013, 17 May 2020)