Insects: The Silver-studded Blue - Plebejus argus

The World of Minibeasts

The Silver-studded Blue - Male, Underside

In contrast to distinguishing the genders, distinguishing species can be quite difficult in the blues family. A good orientation is to look at the underside of their wings.

Finding the differing features is not trivial, but requires a very close look at the details. Nearly all true blues have a whitish-blue background colour (in females, it is brownish, but that doesn't help), black spots and a band of orange spots towards the outer end. Nearly 30 species show this pattern, more or less pronounced.

One of the differing features is the presence of "silver studs". Those are bluish spots in the hind half of the wing above the orange band. They show a metallic sparkle. Only at a certain angle of the incident light they can be seen. This species in fact has four of them, whereas in the picture, only two appear visible.

The name of the Silver-studded Blue suggests that there is only one species, that has the "silver studs", but in fact, there are four species in central Europe. So in addition, the other details have to be compared amongst the four species. One of them is, that the orange spots appear quite separated from each other, and the black spots are relatively large, which makes this the silver studded blue.

Drinking	Male, Top	Female, Top
Male, Underside	Female, Underside	An Unwelcome Visitor
Another Attempt	Alone, Finally