Colotis danae

Species of butterfly

Colotis danae, the crimson tip

Colouration very variable, especially in the female, from orange to red.

Upperside: white, base of wings generally irrorated (speckled), but to a varying extent, with black scales. This irroration in many specimens is entirely wanting. Forewing: with or without a minute black spot on the discocellulars; apex broadly carmine, edged internally and externally with black, this black border varies in width, but both inner and outer borders meet on the costa and on the termen, on the latter they unite and sometimes extend as a black line to the tornus. Hindwing: uniform, except for a series of black terminal spots, which in some specimens are comparatively large and connected together by an anteciliary slender black line, in others minute, more or less obsolescent, unconnected dots.

Upperside: white; base of wings lightly, often heavily, irrorated with greyish black scales. In some specimens the irroration is very scanty, in others it occupies fully a third of the wings from base and extends as a broad band parallel to the dorsum on the hindwing. Forewing: an apical carmine patch as in the male but smaller, sometimes reduced to a mere row of preapical pale rosy streaks, but always bordered externally, and generally internally also, by black of varying width. In some specimens the inner black border is very narrow, in others broad, and in a very few entirely absent. The outer border again in some specimens is inwardly festooned, and may be either broad or comparatively narrow. Discocellular spot as in the male but larger, followed by an anterior, postdiscal, macular, curved, black band, the upper spots of which cross the carmine area, or when the carmine area is reduced to short streaks the band crosses the black internal edging to it, showing up in a darker tint than the edging itself; lastly, a black transverse, somewhat diffuse, spot in interspaces 1 and 2. Hindwing: with a dusky spot on the discocellulars, a black, macular, discal, curved, more or less incomplete band, and a terminal row of black spots that in some specimens are connected and form a continuous band. All these markings are generally diffuse.

Baluchistan, western and southern India, and United Arab Emirates.

C. d. danae — India, Sri Lanka
C. d. annae (Wallengren, 1857) — Malawi, southern and eastern Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, north eastern Botswana, north eastern Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini
C. d. dulcis (Butler, 1876) — Persian Gulf
C. d. eupompe (Klug, 1829) — Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, to southern and western Arabia
C. d. pseudacaste (Butler, 1876) — Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, south eastern Kenya, Tanzania
C. d. walkeri (Butler, 1884) — south western Angola, north western Namibia

The larval food plants include the genera Cadaba, Capparis and Maerua (all in the family Capparaceae).