northeast-flora-and-fauna

I actually got to meet 3 Red-spotted Purples 1 day last May. As this day shows, if you're in the right place at the right time, you can run across them semi-regularly. Of course, "place" can mean different things; this place had 2 Red-spotted Purples interacting with each other, while each of the 1s in this post were seen separately and may have never met 1 another [1]. If you see a largish dark butterfly, it's usually worth trying to get a better look. Sure, sometimes they'll flutter away faster than you can pursue, but if you do get a good look you'll almost certainly discover that the butterfly is more colorful than you realized. These guys will reward you with that black contrasting with the light blue plus those orange spots. This is another species that isn't especially partial to drinking nectar, probably accounting for the lack of flowers in these pictures. In the 1st and maybe the 2nd picture it's possible that the butterfly was hoping to fi...

This was the 1st Mourning Cloak I was able to photograph this spring, though I'm almost sure I had gotten glimpses of them weeks before. Since they overwinter as adults (albeit in a dormant state) they are usually 1 of the 1st butterflies I see every spring. And although they're around all summer, they're not spotted in traditional butterfly hotspots - meadows with abundant nectar-rich flowers - since they prefer drinking sap or the juices from rotting fruits. Although lighting can affect any view , these butterflies are usually a pretty easy ID. A fresh individual will have rich brown wings with a golden rim; these alone distinguish them from any other area butterfly. Admittedly with a quick sighting in flight where all you see is a largish, dark butterfly, it could potentially be confused with our dark swallowtails or a Red-spotted Purple , but with anything close to a good look you should be able to ID these guys. This individual doesn't look especially fresh, no d...

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...

Last summer I saw some butterfly activity; it turns out there were a couple of Red-spotted Purple butterflies fluttering around. I'm not sure what all the commotion was about: One possibility is that these were both males. Males will attack one another [1] to acquire a territory that they think females would like. It's certainly possible that I got a picture of 2 males resting before they resume their territorial fight. The other main possibility is that these were a male and female getting to know one another prior to mating. I don't think 2 females have much motivation to interact; if they're both females, they may have interacted enough to realize that neither was a male, and so their quest for a mate will need to continue. August 31, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 229848756, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] Butterflies don't have conventional mouths for biting; they drink fluids using their proboscis instead. Nor do they have claws or talons on the...

Most of our dark, largish butterflies in this area turn out to be swallowtails (black morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtail , Black Swallowtail , Spicebush Swallowtail ), but here's the most commonly seen exception, the Red-Spotted Purple . You could quibble about the name. When I look at them I initially notice the black, then with a better look I'll detect some blue, and after that I'll notice some orange spots. (I suppose calling it the Orange-spotted Black-and-blue might suggest an insect with bruises in the aftermath of an injury.) This is another example of the name being for a subspecies, not a species. The species name is Red-Spotted Admiral , which comprises both the Red-spotted Purple and the White Admiral . (Looking at the 2 subspecies, you'd probably think you were looking at 2 different species since they look fairly different.) It's possible that the Red-spotted Purple has evolved to look similar to a poisonous swallowtail that I haven't seen but which i...