Blue Morpho

• GeneralIts blue is not a pigment: it comes from the microstructure of its scales, which bends the light.
• That mechanism is being investigated as a way to make textiles, inks and sensors that do not lose their colour over time.
• When it lands it closes its wings and vanishes: the brown, eyespotted underside makes it indistinguishable from a dead leaf, so that in flight it looks like a blue flash that snaps out.
• The blue is not a pigment: it comes from millions of microscopic scales arranged in layers that interfere with light, a structural colour that has inspired optical filters and anti-reflective coatings.
• In flight it alternates the brilliant blue of the upperside with the dull, eyespotted brown of the underside, and seems to appear and disappear.
• It does not visit flowers: it drinks the juice of rotting fruit, sap, fungi, wet mud and the fluids of decomposing animals, and the tip of its proboscis is brush-shaped for exactly that.
• The whole cycle, from egg to adult, takes about 115 days, and the adult lives barely two weeks.
• The caterpillars are occasional cannibals.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Clearings and edges of tropical rainforest

Size at birth

The caterpillar measures 5.25 mm on hatching and reaches 74 to 93 mm in the fifth instar depending on the subspecies; as soon as it hatches it eats its own eggshell to make use of the nutrients

Sexual maturity

The caterpillars feed only at dawn and dusk, and stay completely inactive the rest of the time; those of the first two instars feed somewhat earlier in the afternoon and later in the morning than the older ones

Gestation / incubation

The eggs hatch between 7 and 16 days depending on the subspecies; the larval stage lasts 40 to 60 days through five instars, the prepupa three days and the pupa 8 to 15. The full cycle from egg to adult is about 115 days

Litter / clutch size

Dome-shaped eggs, 1 to 2 mm across, green with brown dots, laid one by one on the underside of the older leaves of legumes (Mucuna, Machaerium, Pterocarpus, Inga, Lonchocarpus)

Sources consulted: Encyclopedia of Life · Rainforest Alliance · DeVries (1987) · Young (1975) · Encyclopedia of Life, ficha Morpho peleides · ficha de especie · Ficha de especie de Morpho peleides (Young & Muyshondt 1973) · Animalia · Ficha de especie de Morpho peleides · Encyclopedia of Life (DeVries 1987) · recopilacion de Morpho peleides

Best time: It flies all year in rainforest and secondary forest, following rivers, tracks and any open clearing; its flight is bounding and zigzagging. It tolerates fragmented forest and prefers partial canopy cover