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Hi

Both of these photos were taken on 9th August at Lac des Gloriettes in the French Pyrenees.
I think this is A.cramera as it is well marked with rounded wingtips. The image in T&L looks right.
This screams A. artaxerxes to me, but on checking Leraut I find that A. artaxerxes does not occur in the Pyrenees, but A.montensis does. The image in T&L of montensis shows a very pointed wingtip but this individual doesn't seem to have this.

To further muddy the waters I looked on Guy Padfields site and he has an image on his montensis page that looks a lot like my first image!

I'm thoroughly confused. Any advice or opinion would be greatly appreciated.

Bob Lambert

Aricia is a notoriously difficult genus to identify using wing shape and pattern alone. For what it's worth, your second insect looks exactly right for montensis, with the rather pointed wings and the diminishing orange spots towards the apex. If the books are right, artaxerxes doesn't fly in the Pyrenees, so I would be fairly confident of that one. The first one is harder. Agestis meets the Pyrenees from the north and cramera from the south. Your butterfly does not look like cramera to me but I certainly couldn't rule out agestis from the wings alone. At altitude I would say montensis is the favourite, but without resorting to violence, I don't think it's possible to tell.

As I note on my page, I wasn't aware of montensis when I took the pictures there, and simply went back through my Pyrenees Aricia when I learnt about the species. I did my best, using the information at the time, but there is no guarantee none of the pictures show agestis, if that does indeed fly in the Pyrenees. I am certain none of them show cramera and they are well out of range for artaxerxes.

In Switzerland, artaxerxes is incredibly variable. I have had some insects from Valais corrected from agestis to artaxerxes by the experts even though they look absolutely perfect for agestis and were flying at valley level. Apparently, agestis simply doesn't fly at those sites, so they can't be it. This year I had what I am sure is agestis at 1900m on my local patch, at a site where artaxerxes flies. I'm waiting for Vincent Baudraz to e-mail me and tell me it must be artaxerxes!

Guy

EDIT: to illustrate the above, here is the male 'agestis' I photographed at 1900m, in a grid square where the species has never been recorded:



And here is a typical artaxerxes from the region:



By rights, they should both be artaxerxes.

Guy

Thanks for the reply. I can now tick off another from my life list.

You've got to love a taxonomist!

Bob