northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a Little Wood Satyr and Appalachian Brown from last June. "Satyr and Brown" aren't a law firm; they are a couple of moderately closely related butterflies collectively in the satyrini tribe . Note that in human groups I would expect a tribe to be a wider set of relations containing multiple families, but in taxonomy it's the opposite; the family is the wider group and can contain multiple tribes. So the Little Wood Satyr and Appalachian Brown are more closely related than some butterflies in their family. Although the spots on the wings and (to a lesser extent) the lines on the wings allow us to distinguish between these butterflies, I suspect you can see a resemblance. Besides the similar background color and general wing shape, just having spots and lines (even if the spots and lines differ a bit) is suggestive of a relationship. These family members could dine together, at least as adults. Both tend to avoid nectar and gravitate towards foods like sap ...

Here's an Appalacian Brown I met in the waning days of summer.  I've shown an open-winged one before , though this view makes it a little easier to ID them. They're very similar to the Eyed Brown , but notice the dark lines on the underside of the wing. In an Eyed Brown, those lines should be much more zig-zaggy. I don't think we have many Eyed Browns around here, but it's probably a good idea to ID these carefully. (From a view of the top of the wing it would be awfully difficult to distinguish these guys.) Another butterfly that has a similar wing pattern that you can definitely find around here is the Northern Pearly-eye . You're supposed to tell them apart because the Northern Pearly-eye has light, nearly-white fringe around its eyespots. All 3 of these species are, as you might suspect, related .  September 8, 2022 at Fairview Farm Photo 248397096, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

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 rem...

I believe this is an Appalachian Brown butterfly, though a slightly more northern species, the Eyed Brown , is also a possibility. This identification would have been more reliable if the butterfly had its wings up; they both have a prominent line seen there, but on the Eyed Brown that line is quite a bit more jagged. In this particular picture, the forewing has a couple of very small eyespots on the forewing; in an Eyed Brown all those forewing eyespots should be approximately the same size. Both these species are in the same genus ( Satyrodes ), eat basically the same food ( sedges ) as caterpillars, look similar, and have some range overlap. They're clearly related, which always makes me wonder if they ever hybridize. One of my guides says they never visit flowers for nectar, mostly drinking sap from trees and maybe drinking fluids from rotting fruit. I tend to wonder whether we've followed these butterflies around long enough and under enough diverse conditions to conclusi...