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...

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...