Pecks vs coras

[Ron Gatrelle]

For those who don't know - which seems to be a great many people - a good
deal of past taxonomic was pretty sloppy.  This becomes ardously evident
when one goes back and tried to fit populations with past taxonomic work.
What is way too often found is that not only did the primary worker do a
sloppy job but so did the secondary researchers.

Up till now I have not done anything with Polites peckius. Over the last
decade I have found a number of them in north Georgia and across the GA
state line in North Carolina. The butterflies AND moths of that area under
studied. Many undescribed entities exist there especially in the moths. The
Pecks Skippers there are a good bit different than what I grew up with in
Iowa. The confusion between coras and pecks, Kirby's vanished specimens,
difficulty in finding original descriptions (OD's), etc. brings one to a
dead end. At this point one can give up and continue with the junk taxonomy
of the past, or do the impossible - try to find the OD's, type material,
then topotypes are reconstruct the taxonomy from the ground up.

Two things. First, let's say the pecks/coras in GA is an undescribed
species or subspecies. Without factual understanding of the original
populations of these names no description of the undescribed can occur.  So
things go undescribed and thus unknown, though sometimes noted by say The
Nature Conservancy.  Second, the southern undescribed pecks/coras/other
population's range is tiny.  It would be amazingly easy to extirpate that
entity via home building and farming in its area so that it would become
extinct before ever known.

I thus solicit information from any in eastern Canada with information on
pecks/coras in the wild, and in Europe who can email copies of early
literature (including OD's with color jpg illustrations) to myself - and
more importantly dig through the drawers for any pertinent Kirby and Cramer
material. Is anyone else working on this besides N. Kondla?
Ron


 
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