Red-spotted Purple

Looking at my next batch of pictures, nothing immediately struck me as something I had something to talk about, but this Red-spotted Purple picture came out pretty good so I'm going to go with that. This is a subspecies I've talked about before. 

The sibling subspecies to the Red-spotted Purple is the White Admiral. It's felt that the Red-spotted Purple no longer looks a lot like the White Admiral because they're evolving to look more like a poisonous species instead, the Pipevine Swallowtail; they're basically pulling the old "I'm a poisonous Pipevine Swallowtail, so you don't want to eat me" trick.

Why aren't the White Admirals also evolving to look like the Pipevine Swallowtail? Well, the Pipevine Swallowtail gets pretty uncommon as you go further north, northern predators aren't afraid of eating a butterfly they rarely/never encounter, and so there's not much of a survival advantage in looking like one.

Oh, one final thought. See those orange spots near the end of the left wing? Those are the "red spots" of the Red-spotted Purple.

September 9, 2022 at Duke Farms
Photo 248760750, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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