Iolaus timon
species of insect
Iolaus timon, the long-tailed sapphire, is a butterfly in the family Lycaenidae. It is found in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Tanzania. The habitat consists of forests.
Adults of both sexes have been recorded feeding from the large yellow flowers of asteraceous plants and the flowers of Poinsettia species.
The larvae feed on the flowers of Loranthus incanus, Phragmanthera capitata, Phragmanthera usuiensis and Phragmenthera polycrypta. They are dull green.
Subspecies
Iolaus timon timon (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria: south and the Cross River loop, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, northern Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo)
Iolaus timon congoensis (Joicey & Talbot, 1921) (Democratic Republic of the Congo: Uele, Kivu, Tshopo, Tshuapa, Equateur, Kinshasa, Sankuru and Tanganika)
Iolaus timon orientius Hulstaert, 1924 (Uganda, north-western Tanzania)
References
External links
Die Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde 13: Die Afrikanischen Tagfalter.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Iolaus timon” is species of insect. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Iolaus, timon and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16753965. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921 and 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iolaus timon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.