wingspan : male 46/55, female 47/63 mm
Astraptes fulgerator, quite common at moderate elevations.
Astraptes fulgerator has been a well known species since 1775, but a 2004 DNA barcoding effort conducted by the University of Guelph, Ontario, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the NMNH, Washington DC, has shown that, for the one and only small Province of Guanacaste in Costa Rica, we would have not one, but ten different species!
these species look identical, have no genitalic divergence, and could only be identified through DNA barcoding, however, they have different food plants, and the caterpillars are distinctive.
so, pending completion of a similar study for the Andean countries and particularly Ecuador, and as long as we do not have results of our specimens DNA barcoding, we simply try to follow Evans and limit ourselves to distinguishing "ssp" fulgerator and "ssp" azul.
West of the Andes we only saw "ssp" azul, all the specimens we saw are definitely blue, and very often purplish blue.
