Tale of Two Continents --

[Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX]

Well, parts of two continents anyway. For whatever, reason my mind recently
turned to a quick and crude comparison of Europe as defined in Higgins and
Riley's field guide to butterflies and then the North American countries of
Canada and USA. This said crude comparison reveals that Can and USA is
roughly at least 3 times the size of europe, has a greater latitudinal and
longitudinal spread and seemingly more environmental diversity as a place
for butterflies to evolve. Yet, for some reason we only seem to recognize
about 1.5 times as many butterfly species as in europe. Geographers and
mathematicians are welcome to fiddle with the crude numbers above but I am
wondering if the species per area difference is real or if it is a
reflection of our relatively more primitive knowledge of the taxonomy of NA
butterflies and history of lumping different looking butterflies into the
same species. Thoughts are welcomed, and so too would be any literature
references in the biogeography realm or from other taxonomic groups of
organisms in case other people have wondered about this.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Norbert Kondla  P.Biol., RPBio.
Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management
845 Columbia Avenue, Castlegar, British Columbia V1N 1H3
Phone 250-365-8610
Mailto:Norbert.Kondla at gems3.gov.bc.ca       
http://www.env.gov.bc.ca


 
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