Northern Crescent (or maybe Pearl Crescent)
There are several different kinds of small orange-and-black butterflies around here in the summer. They mostly look about the same from a distance, and telling them apart requires actually catching them for a close look. A lot of them hang around on lawns, so they are easy enough to catch with a standard butterfly net. Here is one of them that Sam caught back in the middle of June:
At the time, I was experimenting with trying to use sunlight to illuminate the insects while using a low-magnification clip-on macro lens, so the fine detail didn’t come out as well as it might have. But, on the other hand, all we really want to see is the wings anyway.
After spending some time with the guide to Michigan Butterflies and Skippers that we got from the Cooperative Extension Service, we all agreed that it was most likely the Northern Crescent, Phyciodes cocyta. But, upon checking it out on BugGuide, they say that the Northern Crescent is very difficult to distinguish from the Pearl Crescent, Phyciodes tharos, which also lives around here. So, I suppose it could be either, although in general the Northern Crescent tends to be more orange and a bit bigger, and this one was pretty orange and reasonably large (wingspan a bit over an inch).
It looks like the club on the end of the antenna is orange, and overall it is more orange than black, so if it is a Northern Crescent that would probably mean it was a male (females have black antenna clubs and more black on them). They are pretty common butterflies, which implies that they probably have a very common food plant. And they do: they eat members of the family Asteraceae, which is the daisies, sunflowers, and . . . lettuce?[1]
Anyway, they evidently overwinter as larvae that have molted three times, and eat a bit more in the spring before pupating and emerging as butterflies in early summer.
———-
[1] Huh. Didn’t know lettuce was related to daisies – one doesn’t see the lettuce flower much, after all.
Comments are closed.
All you want to see are the wings?!? The poor creature worked on it’s lashes forever this morning, trying to get its mascara just right!
Speaking of lashes: did you ever notice that in kids’ picture books with anthropomorphic animals, the characteristic that the artists almost always use to distinguish males from females is long eyelashes on the females? This is particularly amusing when they have things like anthropomorphic fish, reptiles, and insects – by rights, none of them should even *have* eyelashes.
And this makes me wonder: do women really tend to have longer eyelashes than men do? Or is it just a difference manufactured by using mascara? If it’s just a manufactured difference, I suppose that having an iguana wearing false eyelashes is no sillier than making it anthropomorphic in the first place.
I’ve always wondered how the idea that women have long eyelashes came about, because, personally, I’ve seen more long eyelashes on young boys than on young girls. (It’s easier to tell what the real length is when they’re just children, and I’m pretty sure there is no change even after puberty.)