[leps-talk] Polygonia gracilis

[Grkovich, Alex]

Here in the northeast, gracilis (which is uncommon) is quite distinct from
progne (which is not uncommon in the Canadian Zone but rare southward) and
from faunus (which can be abundant in the Canadian Zone). However, females
of faunus often appear to lack the green spots and then become surprisingly
difficult to distinguish (at least to me) from female gracilis. My
observation, this is that faunus and gracilis are more closely related than
either to progne. Am I correct in anyone's opinion.

Here, a good field mark for gracilis (beside the usual characters), at least
in the males, is the presence of some whitish scales near the FW and HW
apical areas.

There was a record of "zephyrus" from the upper peninsula of Michigan.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Niklas Wahlberg [SMTP:Niklas.Wahlberg at zoologi.su.se]
> Sent:	Wednesday, January 23, 2002 3:45 AM
> To:	Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX; 'lepstalk'; 'lepsl'
> Subject:	Re: [leps-talk] Polygonia gracilis
> 
> Very interesting observations! I've sequenced a couple of zephyrus from 
> Wyoming, but unfortunately I don't have any gracilis at the moment. An 
> interesting observation from my data (which is super preliminary) is that 
> zephyrus and oreas are forming a clade to the exclusion of satyrus and 
> progne! So what it looks like is that oreas has nothing to do with progne 
> (oreas is sometimes considred a subspecies of progne). Now I need to 
> sequence the zephyrus and oreas from BC (that you Norbert kindly sent) and
> 
> to get some gracilis and more progne to see if these preliminary patterns 
> hold up. These difficult species groups are just too cool! Full of 
> surprises they are!
> 
> Cheers,
> Niklas
> 
> At 11:27 22.01.2002 -0800, Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX wrote:
> >There are the usual variety of interpretations in the literature re.
> whether
> >or not gracilis and zephyrus are one or two species. I have gone around
> the
> >mulberry bush on this issue a good deal over the years and have examined
> >hundreds of specimens from most parts of the range of these butterflies.
> I
> >can sleep well at night with the view that there is one species.  In
> >southern British Columbia and in SW Alberta there is tremendous variation
> in
> >appearance (including within individual populations) and I have not been
> >able to draw any neat geographic lines where one entity stops and the
> other
> >starts.  I have placed images of just three of the phenotypic variants
> that
> >fly in my local area on http://www.norbert.eboard.com
> >Have a boo if you are interested; do not worry if some of the thumbnails
> >come up black; just click on the thumbnail anyway and the full image will
> >appear. Enjoy :-)
> >
> >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> >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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> 
> Niklas Wahlberg
> Department of Zoology
> Stockholm University
> S-106 91 Stockholm
> SWEDEN
> 
> Phone: +46 8 164047
> Fax:   +46 8 167715
> 
> http://www.zoologi.su.se/research/wahlberg/
> 
> 
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