Around the time of the American Revolution, some North American lepidopterists were paying
more attention to butterflies than to tea and taxes.
As the redcoats and rebels squared off, the butterfly-chasers gathered their own army...
of specimens, including two new species in the genus Limenitis.
One was the White Admiral, a...black butterfly?…
with white stripes.
The Admiral lives mostly in today’s Canadian provinces – it’s the official insect emblem
of Quebec.
And further south, in the soon-to-be USA, there was a yellow-orange spotted blue, black,
and brown butterfly, which the lepidopterists named the Red-Spotted Purple.
Today, it’s New York State’s butterfly.
Neither insect’s name seems totally spot-on, but the White Admiral is true to its title
in one sense: like a commando in a combat zone, it uses stealth to survive.
Its black and white stripes break up its outline, making it harder for predators to target.
The Red-Spotted Purple, on the other hand, wants to be seen.
Its flamboyant coloration mimics the wing pattern of another, poisonous species, fooling
predators into thinking it’s too dangerous to eat.
For a while, everything stayed pretty straightforward for the lepidopterists: they had two butterflies
with two wing patterns and two approaches to survival and two almost totally separate
territories – but something funky happens near the U.S.-Canada border, where the two
insects’ ranges overlap.
Here, there are butterflies with both colorful spots and white stripes — kind of like
Red-Spotted Purple White Admirals.
They turned out to be the odd-looking offspring of the White Admiral and Red-Spotted Purple.
And this discovery forced the butterfly-namers to wonder whether the Admiral and Purple had
more in common than their patterns suggested.
Obviously when two organisms look very different, it’s natural to want to call them different
species.
But underneath their colors, these two butterflies are surprisingly similar — genetically,
anatomically, and romantically — in fact, they mate with each other in the wild just
as readily as they mate with their own type.
All those factors eventually convinced scientists to bring the two butterflies together in true
taxonomic union: so the two species became one.
And it’s not just butterflies whose looks can be deceiving - many other cross border
cousins aren’t nearly as different as their various stripes and spots suggest.