Lepidoptera | Natural-Japan.net

On my way to the station this morning I found this newly emerged black swallowtail butterfly (jakou ageha) next to the remains of its chrysalis on a tree. It was exciting enough to find my first black swallowtail of the year, but still more exciting is the fact that this species shows Mullerian Mimicry (wikipedia article here) with a moth I photographed last year (here). I’ve combined the two in the fourth picture below so that you can compare them. As you can see, they are nearly identical. Remarkable!