Who is Espejito del Curubo? · Espejito is a specie of butterﬂy who belongs to the Heliconinae subfamily and the Nymphalidae family. Espejito is a four-footed butterﬂy who grows

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Who is Espejito del Curubo? Espejito del Curubo is a female butterfly of orange and bright wings who lives in South America. Her scientific name is Dione glycera. Her common name in Spanish is Espejito that means mirror, because of her wings reflective effect. In the interior side of her wings are visible irregular shapes of reflective silver color. These silver spots reflect like mirrors the colors surrounding Espejito and also the sun rays in the sunny days, creating the effect of a shinning flying butterfly.

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Espejito’s family

Espejito belongs to the subfamily of butterflies Heliconiinae also known as passion-vines butter-flies, because these butterflies feed and grow from passion-vine plants when they are in their caterpillar stage.

This subfamily belongs to a bigger family, the Nymphalidae, the four-footed butterflies. These butterflies use only four of their six legs. The other two remain folded.

The silver spot characteristic is shared with other but-terfly families around the world. The silver spots are found on the interior side of the butterflies’ wings. These sports are visible when the butterflies are posed and their wings are closed.

Silver Spot Butterflies

Oregon Silver Spot butterflyGreat Spangled FritillaryMexican Silver Spot

Interior wings side Exterior wigs side

Where does Espejito live?

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Some Passion-vines live at the foothills or even in lower parts of tropical forests. These species of passion-vines host their own kind of Heliconius butterflies.

The passion-vines and Espejito live at high alti-tudes from 2300 to 3500 meters. Espejitos’ cat-erpillars only feed from these family of plants, and specifically from species like: Passiflora mollisima, Passiflora tripartita, Passiflora tarmini-ana and Passiflora mixta. Espejito and these passion-vines belong to big families of species in which the different family members have adapted to live at different altitudes.

Espejito originates in the Andes mountains in South America where the passion-vines that she eats in her younger stage, the caterpillar, grow.

Another factor that contributes to the adaptation of Espejitos’ passion-vines to different regions is their capacity of growing even in the most challenging environment.

The red color in the map shows the areas in which the passion-vines that Espejito likes are growing in the high mountains of Mexico and Central America. The purple color shows the Andes mountains in South Amer-ica, where these passion-vines originated. The fruits of the mountain passion-vines where appreciated by the pre-Hispanic indigenous cul-tures: Musicas, Incas, Quimbayas, who develop a cultivation system that still in fashion today.

Andes Mountains

Central America and Mexico

How the plant and the butterfly could arrive to Central America and Mexico?

The fruits of these passion-vines are celebrated for their flavor, which people use to make smoothies and desserts. Therefore, people who trade the fruit from South America could incidentally bring the passion-vines to Central America and Mexico. You can imagine the fruit’s seeds grew into plants after some one used a fruit for making a smoothie, then adapted well to that region and propagate throughout time.

The fruit of the Passiflora mollisima is known as Curuba. For this reason Espejito’s com-plete name is Espejito del Curubo, meaning, the butterfly is reflecting the plant, or belongs to the plant.

La Curuba

Check Answer

Question 1. What of these activities and conditions contribute to the distribution of Espejito del Curubo in the different re-gions?

How is the life of Espejito?

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For thousands of years, the butterfly and the plant have adapted to each other. The Curuba uses various techniques to repel the insects that try to devour it, however, the caterpillars of Espejito, decipher its tactics and able to feed exclusively on its leaves. The caterpillars of Espejito spend their lives in the plant of Curuba, these are diurnal insects, they don't fear the attack of predators because their colors alert the possible predators about their poison.

Check Answer

Question 1 of 2Espejito’s caterpillars does not feed from the next sources:

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Conclusion

Espejito is a specie of butterfly who belongs to the Heliconinae subfamily and the Nymphalidae family. Espejito is a four-footed butterfly who grows in certain passion-vine plants.

The passion-vines she likes are species of Curuba. These only grow in the highlands in the mountains of Central and South America. Indigenous peoples from South America grew the plant and lately the fruit has been commercialized and sold in Central America. The plants had adapted to Central America and the butterfly can also be fund also over there.

The life of Espejito as caterpillar pass through four stages. The cat-erpillar feeds from Curuba plants and grow changing of skin in every stage. Catterpillars not only eat the leaves of the plant, they also eat their own eggshell and old skin when the change is fin-ished.

Andes mountains

The Andes is the longest continental mountain range in the world. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about 7,000 km (4,300 mi) long, about 200 km (120 mi) to 700 km (430 mi) wide (widest be-tween 18° south and 20° south latitude), and of an average height of about 4,000 m (13,000 ft). The Andes extend from north to south through seven South American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.

Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated by inter-mediate depressions. The Andes is the location of several high plateaux – some of which host major cities such as Quito, Bogotá, Arequipa, Medellín, Sucre, Mérida, and La Paz. The Altiplano plateau is the world's second-highest following the Tibetan plateau. These ranges are in turn grouped into three major divisions based on climate: the Tropical Andes, the Dry Andes, and the Wet Andes.

The Andes is the world's highest mountain range out-side of Asia. The highest peak, Mount Aconcagua, rises to an elevation of about 6,962 m (22,841 ft) above sea level.

The peak of Chimborazo in the Ecuadorean Andes is far-ther from Earth's center than any other location on Earth's surface, due to the equato-rial bulge resulting from Earth's rotation.

The world's highest volcanoes are in the Andes, including Ojos del Salado on the Chile-Argentina border which rises to 6,893 m (22,615 ft). Over 50 other Andean volca-noes rise above 6,000 m (19,685 ft). The peak of Alpamayo in the Andes of Peru rises to an elevation of 5,947 m (19,511 ft).

Related Glossary Terms

Index

Chapter 3 - Where does Espejito live?

Curuba, Tropical forests

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Butterflies

Butterflies are part of the class of Insects in the Moth order Lepidoptera. Adult butter-flies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the true butterflies (superfamily Papilionoidea), the skippers (super-family Hesperioidea) and the moth-butterflies (superfamily Hedyloidea). Butterfly fos-sils date to the mid Eocene epoch, 40–50 million years ago.

Butterflies exhibit polymorphism, mimicry and aposematism. Some, like the Monarch, will migrate over long distances. Some butterflies have parasitic relationships with or-ganisms including protozoans, flies, ants, other invertebrates, and vertebrates. Some species are pests because in their larval stages they can damage domestic crops or trees; however, some species are agents of pollination of some plants, and caterpil-lars of a few butterflies (e.g., Harvesters) eat harmful insects. Culturally, butterflies are a popular motif in the visual and literary arts.


Index

Chapter 2 - Espejito's family

Species

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Curuba

Known in English like Banana passionfruit is the fruit of several plants in the genus Passiflora, and are therefore related to the passion fruit. They look somewhat like a straight, small banana with rounded ends. It was given this name in New Zealand, where passionfruit are also prevalent. In Hawaii, it is called banana poka. In its Latin American homeland, it is known as curuba, curuba de Castilla, or curuba sabanera blanca (Colombia); taxo, tacso, tagso, tauso (Ecuador); parcha, taxo (Venezuela), tumbo or curuba (Bolivia); tacso, tumbo, tumbo del norte, trompos, tintin or purpur (Peru).

There are several species of banana passion fruit, for example:

• P. tripartita var. mollissima

• P. tarminiana

Mollissima and its close relative Passiflora mixta are vines with cylindrical stems densely coated with yellow hairs, and are vigorous climbers, growing up to seven me-tres. The leaves are a shiny green with clearly defined veins, the flower is large, pink and green petalled with a yellow and white centre. The fruit is yellow-orange when ripe and contains a sweet edible orange-colored pulp with black seeds.

The banana passionfruit is native to the Andean valleys from Venezuela to Bolivia. It was domesticated around the time of the Spanish Conquest and today it is commonly cultivated and its fruit are regularly sold in local markets. The vine is grown in Califor-nia as an ornamental under the name "softleaf passionflower". It is grown to some ex-tent in Hawaii and the State of Tamil Nadu, India.

P. tripartita var. mollissima and P. tarminiana were until recently considered to be one species, P. mollissima.


Index


Andes mountains, Species

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Family tree

Family tree is known in the word of Science as a phylo-genetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching dia-gram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary rela-tionships among various biological species or other entities—their phylogeny—based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. The taxa joined together in the tree are implied to have descended from a common ancestor.

The idea of a "tree of life" arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower to higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being). Early rep-resentations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological rela-tionships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).

Charles Darwin (1859) also produced one of the first illus-trations and crucially popularized the notion of an evolu-tionary "tree" in his seminal book The Origin of Species. Over a century later, evolutionary biologists still use tree diagrams to depict evolution because such diagrams ef-fectively convey the concept that speciation occurs through the adaptive and semirandom splitting of linea-ges. Over time, species classification has become less static and more dynamic.


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Species

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Muiscas

The Muisca are the Chibcha-speaking people that formed the Muiscan Confederation of the central highlands of present-day Colombia's Eastern Range. They were encoun-tered by the Spanish Empire in 1537, at the time of the conquest. Subgroupings of the Muisca were mostly identified by their allegiances to three great rulers: the Zaque, centered in Chunza, ruling a territory roughly covering modern southern and northeast-ern Boyacá and southern Santander; the Zipa, centered in Bacatá, and encompass-ing most of modern Cundinamarca, the western Llanos and northeastern Tolima; and the Iraca, ruler of Suamox and modern northeastern Boyacá and southwestern San-tander.

The territory of the Muisca spanned an area of around 47,000 square kilometres (18,000 sq mi)[citation needed] - a region slightly larger than Switzerland - from the north of Boyacá to the Sumapaz Páramo and from the summits of the East-ern Range to the Magdalena Valley. It bordered the territories of the Pan-ches and Pijaos tribes.

At the time of the conquest, the area had a large population, al-though the precise number of inhabi-tants is not known. The languages of the Muisca were dialects of Chib-cha, also called Muysca and Mo-sca, which belong to the Chibchan language family. The economy was based on agriculture, metalworking and manufacturing.


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Pre-Hispanic or Pre-Columbian era

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Poison

In the context of biology, poisons are sub-stances that cause disturbances to organ-isms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a suficient quantity is absorbed by an organ-ism.


Index

Chapter 4 - How is the life of Espejito?

Drag related terms here

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Pre-Hispanic or Pre-Columbian era

The Pre-Hispanic or pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appear-ance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settle-ment in the Upper Paleo-lithic period to European colonization during the Early Modern period.

Indigenous American cultures continue to evolve after the pre-Columbian era. Many of these peoples and their descendants continue traditional practices, while evolving and adapting new cultural practices and technologies into their lives.


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Muiscas

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Predators

In ecology, predation is a biological interaction where a predator (an organism that is hunting) feeds on its prey (the organism that is attacked). Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation often results in the death of its prey and the eventual absorption of the prey's tissue through consump-tion. Other categories of consumption are herbivory (eating parts of plants), myco-phagy (eating parts of fungi) and detritivory, the consumption of dead organic material (detritus).

All these consumption categories fall under the rubric of consumer-resource systems. It can often be difficult to separate various types of feeding be-haviors. For example, some parasitic species prey on a host organism and then lay their eggs on it for their off-spring to feed on it while it continues to live in or on its decaying corpse af-ter it has died. The key characteristic of predation however is the predator's direct impact on the prey population. On the other hand, detritivores simply eat dead organic material arising from the decay of dead individuals and have no direct impact on the "donor" organism(s).


Index

Chapter 4 - How is the life of Espejito?

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Species

In biology, a species (plural: species) is one of the basic units of biological classifica-tion and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as the largest group of organ-isms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, the difficulty of defining species is known as the species problem. Differing measures are often used, such as similarity of DNA, morphology, or ecological niche. Presence of specific locally adapted traits may further subdivide spe-cies into "infraspecific taxa" such as subspecies (and in botany other taxa are used, such as varieties, subvarieties, and formae).

Species hypothesized to have the same an-cestors are placed in one genus, based on similarities. The similarity of species is judged based on comparison of physical at-tributes, and where available, their DNA se-quences. All species are given a two-part name, a "binomial name", or just "binomial".

The first part of a binomial is the generic name, the genus to which the species be-longs, (Passiflora). The second part is either called the specific name (a term used only in zoology) or the specific epithet (the term used in botany, which can also be used in zoology). (mollisima)

Specie of curuba:

Passiflora mollisiima


Index


Butterflies, Curuba, Family tree

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Tropical forests

Also known as tropical rainfor-est is an ecosystem type that occurs roughly within the lati-tudes 28 degrees north or south of the equator (in the equatorial zone between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn).

This ecosystem experiences high average temperatures and a significant amount of rainfall. Rainforests can be found in Asia, Australia, Af-rica, South America, Central America, Mexico and on many

of the Pacific, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean islands. Within the World Wildlife Fund's biome classification, tropical rainforests are thought to be a type of tropical wet forest (or tropical moist broadleaf forest) and may also be referred to as lowland equatorial evergreen rainforest.


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Andes mountains

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Who is Espejito del Curubo? · Espejito is a specie of butterﬂy who belongs to the Heliconinae subfamily and the Nymphalidae family. Espejito is a four-footed butterﬂy who grows