Banded Blue Pierrot

Discolampa ethion · Order: Lepidoptera · Family: Lycaenidae

No source yet on danger. We have no source yet on whether it bites, stings or damages anything.
Banded Blue Pierrot
Photo: Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India, CC BY-SA

The butterfly has a broad white band edged with dark blue on both forewings and hindwings, with black bases and margins and an iridescent blue sheen. It lives across South Asia and Southeast Asia, from Sri Lanka and India through Myanmar to the Malay Peninsula, the Indonesian islands and the Philippines.

Source: Wikipedia

How to recognize it

Upperside wings show a very broad pure white band edged with dark blue, black bases, black costal and terminal margins, and a light iridescent blue suffusion from the base outward. Underside of the wings is snow-white.

Source: Wikipedia

What it eats

Caterpillars eat young shoots of the plant Ziziphus jujuba; they are flattened, greenish-white with dense white hairs.

Source: Wikipedia

Life cycle

The pupa is bright apple-green with a dark central line, small red dots on the wing-case edges, and is smaller and narrower than that of Castalius rosimon.

Source: Wikipedia

Where it comes from

Its range matches the listed countries and islands across South and Southeast Asia.

Source: Wikipedia

More photos

Same family (Lycaenidae)

Sources

  • Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discolampa_ethion

Look it up elsewhere: GBIF · iNaturalist · BugGuide · Wikipedia

Text written 2026-10-23 from the sources above and checked sentence by sentence against them. Data fetched 2026-10-23.

How this page works

This is one bug's fact sheet. The colored box at the top says whether it is dangerous. Sections below cover how to recognize it, whether it is a pest, and how to deal with it. The US map shows which states have records; tap a state to see other bugs there.

Every fact on Bug FAQ comes from a named source (university extension sites, government agencies, GBIF, iNaturalist, Wikipedia). The source is linked next to each section. If we have no source for something, we leave it out.