northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's another  Red Admiral Butterfly I met. (These guys are fairly common, so you can expect them in more posts.) What's up with the Red Admiral name? It sounds like an antagonist in a Tom Clancy novel, but apparently their name used to be "Red Admirable", and the "admirable" got corrupted into "admiral". Apparently this is also true of other admiral butterflies . This brings up a potentially confusing thing about their name. There is a genus of admiral butterflies (local members including the Red-spotted Admiral and the Viceroy), but the Red Admiral is not in this genus; Red Admirals are actually ladies (like the Painted Lady and American Lady ). When is an admiral not an admiral? When it's a Red Admiral. (Admirals and ladies are both brush-footed butterflies though, so they are sorta related.) You could also ask why this isn't called an Orange Admiral. Well, the Red Admiral is a species native to Eurasia, and probably got named before...