northeast-flora-and-fauna

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...