Northern Pearly-eye

Here's a Northern Pearly-eye, another butterfly that may look familiar even though I haven't shown one before. They look pretty similar to the Appalachian Brown I posted about over the winter (though the picture was from August of 2021). The main difference is probably that the Northern Pearly-eye has a little white around its eyespot wing markings.

As close as those two butterflies may be, the Northern Pearly-eye looks even more like the Southern Pearly-eye; fortunately that species rarely shows up in NJ, since distinguishing between them would probably exceed my ability.

Though my field guides and some online documentation put the browns (Satyrodes) and pearly-eyes (Enodia) in different genera, it looks like the Taxonomy Gods have now decided they both belong in the Lethe genus. I suspect that our relatively new ability to look at genetic codes triggers a lot of these rearrangements.

Note that they got their name from the white inside most of their eyespots, which reminded someone of pearls. (Pearly-eye is pronounced "PURL ee EYE", not "PARE lee EYE".)

June 21, 2022 at Washington Valley Park
Photo 211724462, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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