www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Usually before I go anywhere on holiday I try to make a list of butterflies that can be found at that location. I see that butterflies are often listed in an order, which I presume is referred to as the taxonomic order. Most European books seem to conform to this order, but often butterflies from other parts of the world are listed alphabetically or in some other way.
Is there any way of finding out the best convention for listing butterflies? I recognise that usually Papilionidae are listed before Pieridae, etc, but within each of those families I am never sure how to find out what order to list the individual species. I would appreciate any guidance.

A few thoughts on this, Nick!

Firstly, arranging species linearly into an order is a little like laying the leaves of a tree out in a straight line! Any order will distort the reality to a certain extent and there is probably no single 'best' order.

The present system works something like this: You start at the bottom of the tree and move up until you come to the first branch. You run out along that until you come to the first sub-branch, then run along that &c. &c. until you reach a leaf. Then you run back to the last place you turned off and move outwards again, and when you've done all the leaves on that twig you go back one more step. That way, in theory, you work through every leaf on the tree. However, since some branches are equal, dichotomous divisions, and lots of leaves may sprout from the same twig, you have to make a lot of random choices. Two seemingly quite different orders can represent the same facts.

Current thinking puts the Papilionidae as the first branch off the stem, and thus as the most 'primitive' family. What that means is that all other butterflies might share later evolved features that swallowtails lack, but it says nothing about the 'primitiveness' of modern swallowtail species, some of which diverged very late in evolutionary history and are highly adapted and adaptive butterflies. The same applies to the order within families - butterflies belonging to more 'primitive' groups may be relatively late arrivals - it's all a question of when their group branched off.

To cut a long story short, I think you should use whatever order you find most convenient, whether this is the order in your favourite book, the order you intend to visit sites, habitat, rarity or whatever. The whole point of making lists is to be useful and the most useful lists are those ordered according to the purpose for which they are intended.

Guy

Thank you Guy. Very nicely explained. I suspected that there may not be any agreed convention as I could find nothing on the internet. Obviously ideas about this change over time and I notice that different authors have used different ways to group butterflies.
Looking through books for the West Indies Both Smith and Riley start with Danaidae, move on to Nymphalidae, Lycaenidae, Pieridae, Papilionidae and finish off with Hesperiidae.
However, Marcant, in his Butterflies of Trinidad and Tobago has ordered the butterflies in his book according to their favoured habitat - Butterflies of the home and garden, Butterflies of sunshine and wild flower, The shade dwellers, etc. (rather frustrating I find!!)
I think I would prefer to stick to the European convention as in Tolman, but then make up my own order for the genera and species.
I was thinking that if there was a recognised order for all butterflies word wide then it would be much easier to compare which butterflies live in neighbouring areas or islands. Of course the occasional changing of scientific names, or moving species from one genus to another would further complicate things!

Unsurprisingly (given that he's a clever chap!), Guy is absolutely right. In practice, the order of the families isn't so important - it's like being given a banana, a brick and a car, and being asked to put them into the correct sequence! It just doesn't make sense. However, the narrower the scope, the more useful the classification becomes and there are many good books that will allow you to identify a species down to a particular genus based on specific characteristics, from which you can narrow the search further.

For example, when I visited Thailand last year, I saw a white that I just knew (based on behaviour as well as appearance) was related to our own Wood White, probably in the same subfamily or genus, and I was able to identify it pretty quickly based on that.

Cheers,

- Pete

Let me guess, Pete - Leptosia nina ... I thought exactly the same thing when I first saw this species in India.

I agree with you, Nick, it can be frustating when butterflies are listed by habitat. I've got used to thinking in terms of phylogenetics and that, for me, is a large part of the fascination of world butterflies.

Guy

Padfield wrote:Let me guess, Pete - Leptosia nina ... I thought exactly the same thing when I first saw this species in India.

Indeed it was!
Cheers,

- Pete