Its butterfly season! My favourite time of year.
Every year we are treated to a spectacle on the island when we are visited by hundreds, if not thousands of butterflies who come here from all over Queensland for a winter holiday. These are the Blue Blue Tiger Butterflies (Tirumala Hamata). Other common names are Blue Wanderers, or Dark Blue Tiger.
Blue Tigers are found in Australia from Cape York to Sydney. They can sometimes migrate from North Queensland to the south, and have been reported to migrate north at the end of March and April. Every few years the migrations take huge proportions with millions of the taking part. Clouds of them flying right along the coastline. Cook even reported seeing this in his journals.
They are common in North Queensland, but they often choose Maggie as a place to stop and rest over winter. Here they enter what is known as ‘diapause’. It isn’t hibernation, but they have turned off their sex hormones and are conserving energy ready for the breeding season. When the weather warms up they turn the hormones back on, and they fly off to breed.
Adults have a wingspan of about 70mm and are black with blue spots. The butterflies of this group (subfamily Danianae) the longest lived of all species living 5 months or more. They feed mostly on toxic plants of the Asclepiadaceae family (also known as Milkweed family). These contain several chemicals that are poisonous to many animals, but not to the Blue Tiger larvae. When the larvae eat the vine, the poisonous chemicals get passed on to the pupae and adult butterflies. This makes them taste very bitter, and most birds have learnt to avoid them.
When they are here en mass you can experience them by taking a walk through our Butterfly forest. They are resting, and trying to conserve energy so we should help them out by not disturbing them too much! There are other spots on the island where they congregate but the butterfly forest is the most accessible.
Did you know that a group of butterflies is called a Kaleidoscope? That’s very apt I think.
