Elodina parthia

9 Striated Pearl-white at Pialligo, ACT

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Identification history

	Elodina parthia	8 Feb 2021	SuziBond
	Elodina parthia	7 Feb 2021	DPRees125

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Significant sighting

SuziBond noted:

8 Feb 2021

First ACT record of this species, bringing the ACT butterfly list up to 90 species.

User's notes

Yes a small, white butterfly, but different. I have seen these before so knew it was not a typical Cabbage White. I have considered E. padusa (& E. angulipennis) but have rejected them on the grounds of the under wing pattern of the forewing. The apical dark patch on the wing as seen from the underside is not uniform in these species, they have a darker patch on its inner margin in both. The apical mark on E. parthia is uniform in colour when looked at from the underside, as it is in my specimen. see. Braby, M. (2016) Butterflies of Australia, CSIRO Pub., Melbourne

8 comments

SuziBond wrote:

8 Feb 2021

Wow, what a fantastic find. Yes, I agree with your identification. Which means a new species for the ACT list! Incredible work, thank you for submitting the photos to CNM :)

DPRees125 wrote:

8 Feb 2021

Just goes to show, not every white butterfly is what you dismiss it to be. Soon as I saw it fly I knew it was different.

I will place better quality images on my flickr site. CNM unfortunately destroys image quality

SuziBond wrote:

8 Feb 2021

Exactly, always good to check every unusual butterfly!

Can I please get you to correct the time of the sighting? It appears as 1.57 am, which I presume is incorrect. I'm curious to know what features identify this specimen as a male? Did it hang around for long at the flowers or keep moving?

DPRees125 wrote:

8 Feb 2021

I have loaded another, blurred' image of the insect taking off, should have done this yesterday, Pattern/wing shape suggests a male to me. I have fixed the time. No idea why this happened, EXIF data from photo should have been correct. CNM should work on 24 Hr clock, my 'made in Europe' brain does. First saw it fluttering about the mistletoe then feeding, something which Cabbage whites do not make a habit of doing in my book (there were none of them about anyway, place too dry for them now). eventually if ambled off northwards and it was certainly not on a mission to go places.

JohnBundock wrote:

8 Feb 2021

The time is a site problem. I posted 2 images the day before yesterday and the time, correct on the photo, came up as 11 hours behind the time they were taken.

DPRees125 wrote:

8 Feb 2021

Ok John, that sounds about right, Eastern Australia is GMT/UTC +11 hrs. Guess it tells us something where the source code for this thing was written??

MatthewFrawley wrote:

8 Feb 2021

Fantastic sighting, well done David.

JackyF wrote:

10 Feb 2021

Gorgeous butterfly photos, thank you. In relation to the sighting time problem, which I also experienced, Aaron Clausen emailed me that "We found a bug where the times were incorrect only within the first 24 hrs of being reported! Bug now fixed so it won't happen again." Cheers, Jacky

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