northeast-flora-and-fauna

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. S...

Sometimes members of the same species can look quite different, usually due to sexual dimorphism. For the female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail though, butterflies of the same sex can also look very different. Here is the dark morph of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. All dark morphs are females, and this morph is usually seen later in the season, August and onward. It actually has the underlying pattern that the yellow morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (see below) has, but instead of a black-on-yellow pattern the dark morph is more like a dark-black-on-light-black pattern. The dark morph is considered to be participating in Batesian mimicry , since they resemble the poisonous Pipevine Swallowtail . July 28, 2021 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 148654982, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) I didn't see a yellow morph female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on this trip, but the yellow morph female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail looks fairly similar to the males. They're yellow-an...

Here's a Spicebush Swallowtail that was living near my apartment. This is one of our black swallowtail butterflies that are not the Black Swallowtail . Here's a good article on distinguishing our most common  swallowtails. If you don't remember all of that, don't worry. I suspect that most of these guys would be flattered if you merely recognize them as swallowtail butterflies . The Spicebush Swallowtail is actually easier to identify with the wings up. There you'll see a row of orange spots interrupted by a blue swoosh mark; no other similar-looking butterfly has that blue swoosh. From this angle, I'd look at the row of yellow spots at the edge of the wing. Black Swallowtails would have 2 rows. If this were a dark morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtail , even this row of spots would be virtually missing. And a Pipevine Swallowtail wouldn't have those spots at all. The host plant for their caterpillars is - wait for it - the Spicebush . Sometimes these names actu...