www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Here's a selection, mainly skippers, and mainly from Staten Island last week....


tolerably certain this is a Wild Indigo Duskywing


perchance a worn Common Sootywing




Male Fiery Skippers


The male Sachem

and the female Sachem



a Peck's Skipper.... sorry about the buddliea


Now, I think this is a Tawny Crescent, though the book suggests might be unlikely.... otherwise would have to be Northern Crescent.... I did shoot an underside of another specimen, but it was in the grip of a Crab Spider, and I erased it ( not to my liking, the cruel side) ... not realising it could have clinched Tawny... plain yellow uns hindwing to my recall, but ???

lastly... just how American can a butterfly photo get.... well, try these!!







other species which evaded the camera, or were not worthy of reproducing here were Red Admiral, our Painted Lady (not their's! ), Common Buckeye, Orange Sulphur, a pyrgus of some sort, a very worn Eastern Tailed Blue, and three different individual Black Swallowtails... not bad for what was evidently late in their season.

Great selection! So Pyrgus is just as difficult across the pond, is it?

It's fascinating seeing these American butterflies - some so closely related to our species but exotically different.

Guy

Would the skippers have arrived Stateside via a landbridge or have flown there ?... or vice versa could ours have arrived from America ?

Interesting stuff.

I love the Fiery Skipper in particular.

Would the skippers have arrived Stateside via a landbridge or have flown there ?... or vice versa could ours have arrived from America ?

I reckon they share common ancestors that inhabited Pangaea during the Mesozoic era when Pangeae slowly split into the continents as we know them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

It is also possible that they exhibit Convergent Evolution. This is when creatures evolve to fill similar ecological niches in different places from different ancestors and end up looking very similar. Old World and New World Vultures appear similar, but the New World Vultures are actually highly evolved hawks. Humming Birds (New World) and Sun Birds (Old World) are another example.

Of course, Creationists believe the earth is only 10,000 years old - so must find another explanation.

YMMV

Paul - glad you got back from the States safe and sound. At least you saw a few butterflies.

Why isn't the crescentspot a pearl crescent, Phycioides tharos?

Guy

Rogerdodge wrote:I reckon they share common ancestors that inhabited Pangaea

I gather that the earliest butterfly fossils date back 40 - 50 million years, compared with humans, stretching perhaps 1 - 2 million years. I suspect that, in the extra 48 million years, they learned a bit more about surviving patches of heavy rainfall than we know!

Mike

Rogerdodge wrote: I reckon they share common ancestors that inhabited Pangaea during the Mesozoic era when Pangeae slowly split into the continents as we know them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

It is also possible that they exhibit Convergent Evolution. This is when creatures evolve to fill similar ecological niches in different places from different ancestors and end up looking very similar. Old World and New World Vultures appear similar, but the New World Vultures are actually highly evolved hawks. Humming Birds (New World) and Sun Birds (Old World) are another example.

Perhaps during warmer eras the Bering Strait was sufficiently mild to allow a crossover between creatures on the American continent and those on the Eurasian one.

hmmm... Guy... Pearl Crescent may well be an overall better call... and more likely than Tawny... will have another, better, look at the info I have..... you know what I'm like..... all too easy to will something into being what it isn't !!
Kaufmann quote.. " Hesperids account for 1/3 of all the butterfly species in America"...
The US seems relatively short of Lycaenids to me, the bulk of which are Hairstreaks, which we are relatively short of!. Nymphalids also seem a bit species poor... no great erebia headaches there!.
Many of the Hesperids seem to be further diferentiated species wise, but Pyrgus are a bit thin, compared to orange skippers.
.... more later...

There are quite a few "holarctic" but not migratory species, which seem to have patchy distribution increasing toward the Northern most range.... SPBF, Bog F, Polar F, Frigga F, Titania's F.... etc etc... maybe northern land bridges in warmer times, but post Pangea, may be relevant. - either that or in times long past the above, and other species, covered the whole northern hemisphere, only to become driven north and isolated later. Other examples....

Swallowtail... ? introduced by us.
Small Apollo... holarctic
palaeno
nastes
tycho
Small Copper... ? introduced by us.
Idas Blue
Glandon Blue
Cranberry Blue
improba
freija
chariclea

too many with a Northern bent to be co-incident???

Ah... white flag partly retracted... Pearl Crescent has more basal and post-basal forewing orange than Tawny... that drew my dilemma, the overall darker feel..


Pearl Crescent from Toronto 2006


Staten Island

I sense individual variation will prevent certainty, as both could easily be Pearl despite their differences

You have far more experience of American butterflies than I do, Paul - I was just interested to know how you ruled out the commoner species.

There's a useful plate showing variation in pearl crescent here in Wikicommons:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... aros_6.jpg

Of course, we can't even be sure all these are what they say they are! There are plenty of wrong IDs on the web! As you say, there is more basal orange in all these pictures, though no. 4 is otherwise very close to yours.

My own book gives the clinching features on the underside - rather unhelpfully in this case...

Guy

what posessed me to dump the crab spider photos