www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Top half looks like Red Admiral but the bottom half is all wrong for RA. Cross breed? Aboration? All input gratefully received.

Martin.

Hi Martin,

This is a New Zealand Red Admiral (Vanessa gonerilla).

Kind regards. Mark

Thank you very much. It was taken by someone I know and didn't get the chance to ask him where ho took it yet. I shall now dumbfound with my newly aquired knowledge

Martin.

What a beautiful insect!

I thought someone had been playing with Photoshop when I first saw it!

Another interesting glimpse of evolution! The New Zealand form persists there and the British form here. I expect both show small variability in their home ranges but not much. What makes individual species patterns so persistent and yet different in different places?

I'm intrigued as to why evolution has dictated that this southern hemisphere form has bold spots on the periphery of the hindwings whereas the northern version does not.

I wonder what the common ancestor looked like! Anyway, they're different because they have different environmental forces acting upon them. For example, there may be an avian predator in the southern hemisphere that isn't found in the northern hemisphere, hence the spots. That's how evolution works

Cheers,

- Pete

Similar (but less exaggerated) spots are found on some of the more distantly related painted ladies, like the American painted lady and the West Coast lady:

http://www.wildutah.us/html/butterflies ... adult.html

This suggests their evolutionary origin predates the divergence of red admirals and painted ladies.

Guy