Description
The adults are dissimilar in appearance. Males have translucent forewings with two black spots and a fine black border thickest at the apex of the wing. The hindwing has a thick black border surrounding a central white area with black veining. The black border encloses a series of red spots, whose size and number can vary. Females have wings that are a semi-translucent tawny colour, similar to aged greaseproof paper. This colouration is most intense immediately after the butterfly emerges, but soon fades and renders the wing almost totally transparent. Patterning of the female wing is similar to that of the male, but greatly reduced and diffused, with white areas on the hindwing extremely reduced and all red markings replaced by pale pink. Both sexes have a black body heavily marked with red scales.
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Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)