More on Butterfly Names

© Steve Cary, October 28, 2024

I am back from Peru, which was terrific, but now I have much catching up to do. Before I do a post of any kind regarding Peru butterflies, we have Marta’s story about names, below. And Halloween is not here yet, so you still have a few days to share with me your personal photographs showing the gross, disgusting or grotesque side of butterfly feeding habits. Believe me, there’s plenty out there to be photographed! Email them to me at sjcary1@outlook.com. Entries will appear in an early November post.

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What Else is in a Name? by Marta Reece. A four-hour drive followed by miles of bushwhacking up steep slopes through head-high vegetation and over dead tree trunks should be rewarded, preferably with a new-to-me butterfly species. This being the Chiricahuas with Mexico close by, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I found more than one. Arizona did have a good monsoon year, too, unlike we did in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

But all I had, other than some common species, was a single Sulphur butterfly. Hoping it was something special, I scanned through the Sulphurs in Butterflies of New Mexico website and there she was. Marcellina Sulphur. It matched perfectly. I had never heard of it, so yes, I was excited. I had thought it could be a Cloudless Sulphur, which wouldn’t have been anything special. Just to see what the differences were, I looked for Cloudless Sulphur. And it wasn’t there. It always had been, but now the only mention of it was in a caption under an image of Marcellina Sulphur. Someone had changed the name and missed that one instance of it and the species name in the list of all the Sulphurs. I had been so excited, but all I had that was new was the name.

I did get a lifer shortly after. It happened before we even arrived at the trailhead that day. We stopped along the road, out in the uninteresting flat land north of Magdalena Mountains to check out some horsetail milkweed. I noticed a Metalmark that looked darker than usual. It was hard to get a good picture of it as the milkweed flapped in high wind. The Metalmark was later identified as Mexican Metalmark. There is an asymmetry in Metalmarks, anything with a drop of Mexican Metalmark blood is a Mexican Metalmark. Its relatives, on the other hand, have to be pure blood to count as such.

But while I was fighting the wind to get my Metalmark images, a small Blue landed on the milkweed and got its picture taken just in passing. That turned out to be my new lifer, identified by Steve Cary as Central Dotted-Blue. I seem to remember it as Central Buckwheat-Blue, but I could be wrong. Again, I went to Butterflies of New Mexico, this time to learn more about the species. I finally found it, under Square-spotted Blue. The scientific names matched. I list my butterflies by common names, though. Steve’s name was the one closer to what I already had in my head, so I went with it.

There is an even easier way to get a lifer, all you need is for someone to split the species you already sampled over a wide range into two. That happened to me earlier this year. I submitted a Red Satyr to BAMONA, since there didn’t seem to be a record from that particular area, and it came back as Southwestern Red Satyr, Cissia cheneyorum.

So, I expected something like it again when I posted a female Echo Azure. It was a spring form and when I first saw it, I was sure I’d never seen anything like it, black wings with huge white centers. Well, they were dark blue, with more like light blue centers, but you don’t see that in the field. The official identification was Mexican Azure. I went to look into BofNM to see if I can split my Echo Azures into two. I found a Northern Azure and Echo Azure and one more into the bargain but no Mexican Azure. From the distribution it looked like all of mine were Echo Azure.

I don’t know how common such name changes/disagreements are, but they account for a high percentage of the species I looked up. I imagine there are many other people facing difficulties when names keep changing. Some changes are necessary as new information comes in, but some appear to be more a matter of taste. The names become even more important because the only way one has of finding something in BofNM is by name. When a change does need to be made, maybe there could be some equivalent of a forwarding address to help us navigate.

Even when a user does know the name and the name does correspond to the one in BofNM, that person still needs to know the correct family or subfamily (the names of which have also changed in some cases) and then can only find the species by going through the lists. Some of those lists have grown to the point they no longer fit on a page. While there is some logic to the organization of the species listed, from outside they appear to be in no particular order.

Without a search function, the website is not nearly as useful as it would be otherwise. I can still find things, because I have worked with it for some time, but for someone coming in, it’s daunting. It is also not how most websites operate, so people don’t expect it and likely are not willing to go to the effort of finding the species. They may assume that if the overall design of the site is poor, the information they may obtain by doing so will be as well. This is most definitely not the case. I love the site. I have used the information for years and found it very helpful – the maps, the descriptions, the images. It would be very much worth the time and effort to make this information more accessible. If it is prohibitive to go to the expense of getting a search function, at the very least an alphabetical list of species could be provided, so one could search that way. Maybe, some of the alternative names could be on that list as well, so more people would be able to find things.

Now that I got this off my chest, I can go back to deciding what I am going to call my butterflies, the ones I have more than one name for.

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SJC: Marta, thanks for putting into words some of the thoughts/feelings/frustrations that many users have expressed regarding butterfly names. You accurately described a few of the particular situations that are so troublesome. Mike and I struggle with them too, both for ourselves as well as how we present it to BONM users. If it’s hard for us, it must be even harder for users, so thank you for bringing that to our attention.

What can we do about it? Your suggestion – a search function – seems like a sensible approach. We can’t control the scientific nomenclature situation, nor should we be inventing new common names, but we can make it easier for users to find any name they seek in BONM. Happily, PEEC is already working with us to pull together a searchable index of names. We’ll start with common (English) names and PEEC hopes to have something in place for users to test out in a few weeks. When it happens, I will get the word out in a blog post.

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Here is a tidbit from Peru: Lamasina lathyi, a lovely hairstreak (a tad larger than a Colorado Hairstreak) whose genus honors Dr. Gerardo Lamas, Director of the Peruvian Natural History Museum in Lima, and our gracious host for the trip. Yes, the left hindwing is torn, but how else could you see the sky-blue upperside?

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Until Halloween!