(NEW April 28 PAPILIO SERIES) 2006 TAXONOMIC STUDIES AND NEW TAXA OF NORTH AMERICAN BUTTERFLIES by James A. Scott (also editor), Michael S. Fisher, Norbert G. Kondla, Steve Kohler, Crispin S. Guppy, Stephen M. Spomer, and B. Chris Schmidt Abstract. New diversity is reported and discussed among North American butterflies. Several dozen new taxa are named. A new "sibling" species has been found to occur throughout the Rocky Mts., introducing a new butterfly species to most states in western U.S. and to southern Alberta and BC. Several taxa of Colias, Euphydryas, Lycaena, and Plebejus are raised to species status. Many nam.e changes are made, and many taxa are switched between species to create several dozen new combinations. The relevance of species concepts to difficult groups of butterflies is explored. Introduction This paper consists of miscellaneous taxonomic studies on North American butterflies, some in the northeast, but mostly in the west. Most of the diversity of butterfly fauna in North America is in the western mountainous areas, where the human population is lower, so it has taken longer to study western butterflies, and a lot more study is needed. We have made new findings on many wes.tern butterflies, and this progress is reported below. And Scott recently moved his collection out of old dermestid-infested drawers into fine very-tight ones that those beetles cannot enter, and in the process of resorting them found a dozen unnamed subspecies, which are named below. As we study our butterflies and learn more and more about them, a disturbing pattern has emerged. There is a residue of difficult groups that have lots of problems, and these groups seem to defy all the methods we use to study them, and they also defy all the species concepts that .humans have devised in order to pigeonhole them into a checklist in pleasing fashion. This is a problem for lepidopterists, who have the desire to place all of our natural creatilres into fixed categories of genus, species, and subspecies. Those categories were designated by Linnaeus and codified by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, without consulting the actual butterflies. It would appear that our butterflies in nature care nothing about species concepts, or populations, or subspecies, or species, or genera (and even to lepidopterists, genera are arbitrary); all an emerging butterfly adult cares about in nature is to mate, and he or she uses a few scent/visual stimuli to accept or reject a possible mate that is encountered, and when mating occurs, everything else that follows that we care about (subspecies and species) happens without knowledge of that butterfly. We have more and more decent theories about how wild animal populations evolve, and yet taxonomic studies more and more bump up against intractable groups that defy all of those theories. Because the butterflies do not care about our species· concepts, many of our bugs do not fit the biological species concept, because they have hybridized or introgressed or converged in a manner that appears random or incomprehensible, or they form a rassenkreis, or they are inadequately studied because of haphazard choice of study sites or incomplete or poor research, etc. I have taken the liberty of calling these difficult cases "stenchospecies", a loose species concept that reflects the reality we see in nature, and expresses the disappointment that taxonomists feel when the bugs do not fit into convenient checklist categories. Examples of stenchospecie.s are Colias alexandra/occidentalis~christina, Pieris "napi", Cercyonis sthenelelmeadii, Euphydryas chalcedona!colonlanicialbernadetta, Chlosyne palla/acastuslneumoegeni, Phyciodes tharos!cocyta/batesii, Limenitis lorquinilweidemeyerii, Apodemia "mormo", Callophrys affinis/apama/perplexa! dumetorum/sheridanii!lemberti/comstocki, Plebejus anna/idas!melissa, Plebejus acmon/lupini/chlorina, Euphilotes battoides/enoptes, etc.). The easy taxonomic studies have mostly been done, and a lot of stenchospecies are left. Supposedly "ideal" taxonomic studies have been done on bugs sµch as Colias occidentalis-alexandra and Apodemia mormo and Lycaena dorcas-hellodes and Lycaeides (Vladimir Nabokov has now almost been enshrined as a god complete with an entire book by Kurt Johnson praising his lepidoptera work), but more research has shuffled those stenchospecies in a very different manner (Nabokov's species are scattered to the winds like fall leaves). The "ideal" taxonomic study does not exist because every paper is just a progress report, and stenchospecies will stink up every person studying them even if he does a thorough "ideal" study, because, basically, the bugs have not read the book on the ideal species and subspecies. 2 There are about 23 different species concepts, and the bugs don’t care about any of them. It’s like what Laura Ingalls said on the TV show “Little House on the Prairie”. Little Laura caught many fish at the pond using doughballs for bait, while grumpy banker Mr. Sprague had caught none with his fancy lures. Laura tried to get Mr. Sprague to use some of her doughballs, but Mr. Sprague retorted “Young lady I have been fishing for more years than you have been alive. My lure is absolutely correct for these waters and I have read many many books on the subject that will prove that it is correct.” Laura replied: “Well…., maybe the problem is,….that the fish just haven’t read the books.” Our butterflies haven’t read the books either. Thus the “ideal” taxonomic study may turn out to be shoddy in part, and a shoddy-looking paper may prove to be great. A paper that looked at thousands of specimens may be mostly wrong, as misleading characters may have been emphasized or the analysis was wrong or misidentifications occurred or the larvae & pupae may hold the key (for instance the larvae and pupae showed Scott that Anatrytone and Atrytone, and Notamblyscirtes and the dracula-caterpillar Amblyscirtes, were greatly different genera, even though the adult differences were small). With stenchospecies, human brainpower is useless, one must merely plod along and let the bugs drag one by the nose, kicking and screaming, to their apparent conclusion, which may be just a checklist of compromised bookkeeping species (defined as a smaller portion of the stenchospecies that works in a small part of the range to make a convenient linear presentation in local scientists’ checklists, but does not work on a larger map) rather than compromised biological species. Another generation of lepidopterists and several more decades will be required to make sense of stenchospecies like battoides/enoptes. The reader may think that the word stenchospecies is crude and unprofessional. But we have to admit that the stenchospecies—and its working slave the bookkeeping species--is just as good a species concept as any other when we realize that species concepts are human constructs, and all are worthless from the bugs’ viewpoint. Thus the stenchospecies is as valid as any other species concept (just as valid as the “superspecies” concept, which almost noone uses), and adds the virtue of being emotionally pleasing, as the taxonomist can comfort himself knowing that it’s the stenchospecies’ fault that his brainpower is useless and the bugs fail to conform to any logical scheme as they introgress and converge and diverge and mutate in apparently random senseless ways. Since the species concept is an artificial human construct, adding an emotional component gives the stenchospecies concept more value from the human standpoint. When I was a kid, I thought butterfly species were real. I gradually realized the problems, and those problems have actually steadily increased. Every year as our knowledge grows, it gets more difficult to pigeonhole the diversity of butterflies into species that people can agree on. Go back and read the list of stenchospecies listed above, and you will realize that the problems in all of them seem a lot worse now than they did just a few decades ago. So the idealistic reader who dislikes the term “stenchospecies” should just substitute some other more polite term like superspecies (and use semispecies for the bookkeeping species), and continue his/her elusive quest for a satisfactory checklist. But this paper tries to solve some of these difficult cases anyway, despite the difficulties. We also try to solve associated nomenclatural problems that are cursed by troublesome names--toxotaxa. Colias occidentalis/alexandra group: introduction, by J. Scott This group is discussed here because it has numerous problems, and we attempt to solve some of them. A fully robust solution to all of them may be decades away, and involve lots of rearing and field study, but at present we have three new ssp. to name and we transfer another name to another species, and we note difficulties in other taxa. To begin with, the taxon astraea W. Edwards has been treated as a ssp. of Colias christina W. Edwards, and currently is treated as a ssp. of C. occidentalis Scudder by some authors. However, examination of the original description and holotype by N. Kondla and later by J. Scott, indicates that astraea is actually related to alexandra W. Edwards, and does not belong to the Mont.-N Wyo. ssp. of christina. This relationship was recently mentioned by Warren (2005) as well. We have also found several new Great Plains ssp. of C. alexandra group, one of which appears to be closer to the Great Basin edwardsii W. Edwards than to mountain ssp. alexandra. It seems necessary here to discuss the geographic variation of C. occidentalis and C. alexandra, because the name “astraea” and the new ssp. fit right into the middle of that mess. Colias occidentalis and C. alexandra definitely are stenchospecies. Ferris (1973) lumped all of the component taxa into C. alexandra, except for occidentalis, following A. B.