www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Yes - that's a very useful article Roger, and one I often use as a weapon in my pointless war against the concept of the 'species'!! It contains the surprising statistic: "Overall, around 16% of the 440 butterfly species are known to hybridize with at least one other species in the wild. Of these perhaps half or more are fertile, and show evidence of back crossing in nature".

Now, to answer Matsukaze's question...

Guy

padfield wrote:An interesting consequence of 'splitting' species is that the conservation status of some of these small populations may be thought to go up! What's in a name? Quite a lot, if the name means a particular region is home to an endemic species...

About a month ago, I went to the Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture in Oxford, given by Nigel Collar of Birdlife International. His title was "A Species is what I say it is" and, in the course of the talk, he referred to several of the issues that have been noted in this thread. In the birding world especially, the 'splitting' or 'lumping' of species can be highly politically sensitive for countries which rely on grants to maintain threatened species and on tourism to observe these species. For birds, at least, the speaker was more inclined to go with morphological features and was somewhat dismissive of DNA techniques, at least at the present state of the art, although I think he was mainly being critical of 'broad-brush' methods which rely on stating that this genome differs from that by X%.

Mike

padfield wrote:Yes - that's a very useful article Roger, and one I often use as a weapon in my pointless war against the concept of the 'species'!! It contains the surprising statistic: "Overall, around 16% of the 440 butterfly species are known to hybridize with at least one other species in the wild. Of these perhaps half or more are fertile, and show evidence of back crossing in nature".

I already know that Chalkhill and Adonis Blues can hybridise, but what about other British species?

Can the Whites successfully breed with one another? The Vanessids?

On the continent, can different species of Pyrgus interbreed?

Roger Gibbons wrote:The current list of European butterflies is on this page (the link is European butterflies) for anyone who is interested. This list is allegedly the final and agreed list that the taxonomists have agreed upon.

http://www.bc-eig.org.uk/Species.html

Roger

As you suggest it seems to be out of date already with the latest developments with Wood Whites this year.

Terry Hotten

David M wrote:

padfield wrote:Yes - that's a very useful article Roger, and one I often use as a weapon in my pointless war against the concept of the 'species'!! It contains the surprising statistic: "Overall, around 16% of the 440 butterfly species are known to hybridize with at least one other species in the wild. Of these perhaps half or more are fertile, and show evidence of back crossing in nature".

I already know that Chalkhill and Adonis Blues can hybridise, but what about other British species?

Can the Whites successfully breed with one another? The Vanessids?

On the continent, can different species of Pyrgus interbreed?

How about common and adonis blue? Similar size and around at the same time. Or Dingy and grizzled skippers.

Susie wrote:How about common and adonis blue? Similar size and around at the same time. Or Dingy and grizzled skippers.

So would they be called Gringy or Dizzled Skippers?

Susie wrote:
How about common and adonis blue? Similar size and around at the same time. Or Dingy and grizzled skippers.

I think Adonis and Chalkhill can interbreed because they're both Lysandra, whereas Common Blue is Polyommatus. That's why I wondered whether different species of Pyrgus might interbreed or, for that matter, Brimstone & Cleopatra (Gonepteryx) and Orange Tip & Provence OT (Anthocharis).

Come in Piers!