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A regular morph of Clouded Yellow? (1 Viewer)

KenM

KenM

Well-known member
Last week at Paphos, Cyprus....in a field of Clouded Yellow Butterflies, this anomalous individual, presume just an occasional variant, the yellow replaced by white on the top wing?

Cheers
 

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Not a totally normal female, they too are yellow. But a helice female, a relatively less common form.
 
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Farnboro John said:
Jos Stratford said:
Not a totally normal female, they too are yellow. But a helice female, a relatively less common form.[/QUOTE

I'm not sure of the percentage in the population but they are common enough that I've seen several in Southern Britain.

John
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I suspect that you get CY's on a fairly regular basis John living in the "deep" South, up "ere in Essix" we don't get them that often, so to see one of the latter would be a bit special!
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KenM said:
Farnboro John said:
I suspect that you get CY's on a fairly regular basis John living in the "deep" South, up "ere in Essix" we don't get them that often, so to see one of the latter would be a bit special!
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It varies year to year. It's a long time since I've seen a really big invasion of CY (I dimly remember coming back to Porthgwarra village from a seawatch once to find hundreds if not thousands in the fields) but even with only ones and twos about on the South Coast you can still run across helice females. The Dorset coast is quite good, I've definitely seen them at Portland and Winspit.

John
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Farnboro John said:
I'm not sure of the percentage in the population but they are common enough that I've seen several in Southern Britain.
Click to expand...

In my experience, I would say the helice is frequently less than 10% of the female population, perhaps more in some areas, but certainly less in other areas (maybe only 1-2%).
 
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Farnboro John said:
KenM said:
It varies year to year. It's a long time since I've seen a really big invasion of CY (I dimly remember coming back to Porthgwarra village from a seawatch once to find hundreds if not thousands in the fields) but even with only ones and twos about on the South Coast you can still run across helice females. The Dorset coast is quite good, I've definitely seen them at Portland and Winspit.

John
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There were loads of this form on the Scillies one year in the late 90's I think it was.


A
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It's certainly stated in the literature that f. helice occurs between 5-10% of the females in a given population, perhaps towards the higher end the further south you go.
Martin
 
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