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Our largest species of emerald; wings a uniform green with white AM and PM lines, wing fringe white with fine pink stripes. Abdomen green dorsally, shading to white at the terminus, three to four round white spots dorsally within green basal half of abdomen. The Pale Beauty (Campaea perlata) is larger, greenish white, and lacks pink in the wing fringe. Other Nemoria species and their kin have the white hindwing PM line closer to the margin, more than halfway from the wing base to the outer margin; in unitaria, the PM line is halfway or less between the wing base and the margin, and is often connected to the AM line forming a U-shaped white line on the hindwing rather than two discrete lines which meet the anal margin. Alberta populations were initially described as a separate species, Aplodes hudsonaria Taylor (TL: Red Deer R. 50 mi. NE Gleichen). Although Alberta specimens tend to be slightly larger than avergae and more often show the pink wing fringe spots, Ferguson (1985) considered hudsonaria to be conspecific with unitaria.

The larval hosts are not known. Prentice (1963) reports one collection each on cedar (Thuja sp.) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), but given the paucity of unitaria records from the thousands of conifer collections of the Forest insect and Disease Survey, conifers are not likely to be usual hosts. Ferguson (1975) was able to rear larvae to maturity on gooseberry (Ribes sp.).