Member-only story
A Butterfly Overlooked
Dancing among the weeds
I had dismissed the butterfly as a Cabbage White (Pieris rapae, Pieridae), native to Europe but now the Nemesis of brassica-growers in many parts of the world. The Cabbage White arrived in Melbourne in 1929, and by the 1970s it was all over the place, including Far North Queensland. A mid-sized white butterfly dancing around the weeds in a garden — what else was it likely to be?
Quite a few things, as it turns out. I had made the error of not paying attention. When the butterfly settled, the vivid scarlet and gold of the underwings were unmissable. It was not a boring old Cabbage White, but a Red-banded Jezebel (Delias mysis, Pieridae), also known — bafflingly — as a Union Jack. (There is no blue on the butterfly, and no yellow on the Union Flag.)
In my defence, it was pre-morning coffee. An elephant could have marched through the garden and I would not have noticed until it hurled a mango at my head.
Two hundred and fifty Delias species are found in Asia and Australia. Of those, about 150 occur in New Guinea, and only 10 in Australia. The genus is thought to have originated on the Australian tectonic plate following the plate’s split from Antarctica during the break up of Gondwana. As the continent moved towards the equator and the interior became more arid, the genus dispersed…
