THE BUTTERFLY AT
MY SCREEN WINDOW
The other day I was typing away when a small
butterfly entered my casita, streaked between my nose and the keyboard, and began bouncing
against the screen window next to me. You can see the very butterfly below:
At first glance my visitor looked like it belonged to the large subfamily of North
American butterflies to which the abundant Red Admiral and Painted Lady belong, so I
figured it was a member of the subfamily Nymphalinae. Therefore, at the wonderful
"Mariposas Mexicanas" website ("mariposas" means butterflies) at http://www.mariposasmexicanas.com I searched
all of that subfamily's pictures but found nothing like my window-bumper.
Then I sent the above picture to Mike Strangeland, who administers the Mariposas
Mexicanas website. In a couple of hours I got a response. Mike wrote, "...
that's one of my most favorite butterflies in Mexico... I know he looks like a Nymphalinae
but he's actually a skipper, ATARNES SALLEI (Orange-spotted Skipper)."
Skippers, I thought, were dumpy looking little butterflies, basically half-moth,
half-butterfly, with wings held at 45-degree angles and with greatly oversized, blunt
heads. I'd never seen a skipper as butterfly-looking as this.
"Yes it seems there's a little convergent evolution going on in the butterfly
world and sallei is a good example," Mike explained. For some reason this
skipper needed to look like a Nymphalinae and he was doing a good job.
Mike was so tickled with my photograph that I decided to send him another I'd taken
awhile back but never got around to writing about, and I was about to delete it from my
hard disk.
"Please never trash any butterfly photos from Mexico, send them all to me,"
Mike shot back. "There have been about 30 new species of butterfly discovered in
central and south Mexico over the last 10 years or so and half of those were discovered in
the past 3 years. It's a very exciting time to be studying and photographing butterflies,
so please photo everything you can get close to and send them to me!" |