Butterflies Mistaken For Moths

Here are a couple of butterflies without fancy patterns or flashy colors that occasionally are mistaken for moths. They are a Clouded Sulphur and a Cabbage White, which are in the white and sulphur genera respectively, and both of which are in the same family of butterflies. 

As smallish and somewhat plain-looking butterflies, you might not be surprised to learn they're somewhat related. The female Clouded/Orange Sulphurs can look virtually white, making the family resemblance even stronger.

While I'm treating butterflies and moths as different groups under the lepidopterans, they're not exactly radically different groups. It's certain that butterflies evolved from moths (when and why discussed here), and so there's some reason to consider butterflies to be a subset of moths. This isn't too different from the people who consider birds/dinosaurs to be types of reptiles [1].

June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 300993980, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 300994012, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] Although mammals evolved from animals that we'd consider reptilian, we usually consider those reptilian ancestors to be amniotes that spawned off 2 important and distinct surviving groups, the synapsids (mammals) and sauropsids (reptiles and dinosaurs/birds). 

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