Endangered
Queen Alexandra's birdwing
Ornithoptera alexandrae
Queen Alexandra's birdwing is a moth or butterfly in the family Papilionidae (order Lepidoptera) — Ornithoptera alexandrae, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The female has brown wings with white markings arranged as two rows of chevrons. The hindwings are brown with a submarginal line of centred yellow triangles. The body is cream coloured and there is a small section of red fur on the brown thorax.
The female can reach, and slightly exceed, a wingspan of 25 to 28 cm (10 to 11 in), a body length of 8 cm (3.1 in) and a body mass of up to 12 g (0.42 oz), all enormous measurements for a butterfly.
Range and habitat
This birdwing is restricted to the forests of the Oro Province in eastern Papua New Guinea.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The adult is what most collections hold. The larva — the feeding stage — is often undescribed for the rarest names.
Life history follows the order: complete metamorphosis in moths and beetles, nymphs in grasshoppers and bugs. This page does not invent a host plant that no source named.
In crisis
The species is endangered and one of only four insects to be listed on Appendix I of CITES, making commercial international trade illegal. The Queen Alexandra's birdwing is considered endangered by the IUCN, being restricted to approximately 100 km2 (40 mi2) of coastal rainforest near Popondetta, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. The major threat for this species is habitat destruction for oil palm plantations.
In 2007, "global butterfly smuggler" Hisayoshi Kojima pleaded guilty to 17 charges after selling a number of endangered butterflies, among them a pair of Queen Alexandra's birdwings priced at US$8,500, to a special agent with the U.S. Although collectors are often implicated with the decline of this species, habitat destruction is the main threat.
Named moths and butterflies with a high threat category are often known from a small range and a thin series. Host-plant loss leaves little to recount.
Queen Alexandra's birdwing is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Queen Alexandra's birdwing, Wikidata item Q932602. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
