The Queen of the Falklands Fritillary

[Mike Robinson]

Super-Sorry to bother but I have been checking through a set of Falkland Islands' Stamps which includes The Queen of the Falklands Fritillary (Issoria cytheris). My problem is that there is also a Cytheris Fritillary (Yramea cytheris) and they seem to be interchangeable! I have been going backwards and forwards trying to understand what is going on. I wonder if anyone here can shed any light please? Thanks in advance..

[bugboy]

According to Wikipedia they're simply synonyms of the same species

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yramea_cytheris

[Padfield]

The butterfly closely resembles a Queen of Spain fritillary but is correctly in the genus Yramea according to all my reference books. The relation between Issoria and Yramea is given graphically here:

http://tolweb.org/Argynnini/70206

To quote from that page: "The positions of Yramea and Boloria have been disputed as well. Yramea has earlier been considered to belong to the genus Issoria (Warren 1955), but the studies by Simonsen (2006b) and Simonsen et al. (2006) clearly show that this is not the case. Simonsen (2006b) had Yramea and Boloria as sister taxa in one subtribe, Yrameina. The phylogeny favoured here is from Simonsen et al. (2006) with Yramea in it’s [sic] own subtribe as the sister groups of Boloriina , Argynnina."

Guy

[Mike Robinson]

Dear both: thanks very, very much for looking at this. It is much appreciated...