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Purple Emperor Butterfly — printable fact sheet
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Purple Emperor Butterfly
Apatura iris
Apatura iris is the butterfly that ignores flowers. Adults almost never take nectar; instead they come down from the oak canopy to feed on dung, carrion, urine, rotting fish and the oozing sap of wounded trees, drawing salts and amino acids that nectar cannot supply. British lep…
Did you know?
- Purple Emperor males are known to land on sweaty humans to obtain salt and minerals from perspiration.
- Purple emperors have been photographed feeding on fox scat and dead badgers, and the surest way to find one is to look at the ground, not at flowers. The caterpillar's overwintering colour change is a direct match to the twig it sits on, and it repositions in spring to sit along a leaf midrib. The best-known British colony is at Knepp in Sussex, where rewilding produced dense scrubby sallow and the purple emperor population exploded, becoming one of the strongest arguments for messy, unmanaged land.
What I learned
Draw the purple emperor butterfly
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