''Colias sifanica'' is a

butterfly Butterflies are insects in the macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera from the order Lepidoptera, which also includes moths. Adult butterflies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprise ...

in the family

Pieridae The Pieridae are a large family of butterflies with about 76 genera containing about 1,100 species, mostly from tropical Africa and tropical Asia with some varieties in the more northern regions of North America and Eurasia.DeVries P. J. in Le ...

. It is found in the eastern

Palearctic realm The Palearctic or Palaearctic is the largest of the eight biogeographic realms of the Earth. It stretches across all of Eurasia north of the foothills of the Himalayas, and North Africa. The realm consists of several bioregions: the Euro-Sib ...

(China and Tibet).

Description

''C. sifanica'' from

Amdo Amdo ( �am˥˥.to˥˥ ) is one of the three traditional Tibetan regions, the others being U-Tsang in the west and Kham in the east. Ngari (including former Guge kingdom) in the north-west was incorporated into Ü-Tsang. Amdo is also the ...

and the

Qinghai Lake Qinghai Lake or Ch'inghai Lake, also known by other names, is the largest lake in China. Located in an endorheic basin in Qinghai Province, to which it gave its name, Qinghai Lake is classified as an alkaline salt lake. The lake has fluctuate ...

, is pale sulphur yellow above in male, with darkened base, diffuse dark marginal and submarginal markings and black middle spot. Antenna red. Underside with lighter ground colour than upper, but dusted with dark, the dark markings very feebly developed, the middle spot of the forewing being black with white centre, and that of hindwing white. The female impure white above, the dark markings more sharply defined, the hindwing being yellowish. The proximal portion of the underside of the forewing is white; the hindwing has a larger and a smaller white middle spot, the ground colour being lighter than in the male, dusted with grey-greenish scaling. A darkened form of this species is being sold as ''nebulosa'', but is not identical with this species. In this form ''tancrei'' from the Kuku-nor, which we name ab. ''tancrei'' (25 f), the black marking are more developed and the proximal area of the forewing and hindwing is so strongly dusted with dark that there remain only narrow streak-like spots of the yellow ground colour.

Biology

The larva on feeds on ''

Caragana ''Caragana'' is a genus of about 80–100 species of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae, native to Asia and eastern Europe. They are shrubs or small trees growing tall. They have even-pinnate leaves with small leaflets, and solitary or clu ...

'' species.

Subspecies

*''C. s. sifanica'' Amdo, Qinghai, Gansu *''C. s. herculeana'' Bollow, 1930 Gansu

Taxonomy

It was accepted as a species by Josef Grieshuber & Gerardo Lamas.

References

External links

''Colias sifanica'' von J. Fuchs
Butterflies described in 1891 sifanica Butterflies of Asia {{Pieridae-stub