Endangered
Paralucia spinifera
Paralucia spinifera
Paralucia spinifera is a gossamer-winged butterfly in the family Lycaenidae (order Lepidoptera), recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
The upper sides of its wings are copper-colored and have a purple, blue, and green iridescence when in the sunlight. The undersides of the wings are patterned with brown, black, and gray. Its black antennae are dotted with white spots, and end with a black tip.
The wingspan is of 20–30 mm.
Range and habitat
The purple copper butterfly usually lives in found primarily in altitudes above 900 m (3000 ft), and are generally seen with exposure to the full day sun (often with a west to north appearance), and with extremes of cold such as regular winter snowfalls or heavy frosts where it feeds on a form of blackthorn.
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 Bathurst copper butterfly is considered endangered in NSW and is listed on Schedule 1 of the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 (TSC Act). Current threats to the Bathurst copper butterfly include clearing and development, weed invasion, grazing, and changes in controlled burn procedures.
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.
Paralucia spinifera 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 Paralucia spinifera, Wikidata item Q3024083. 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.
