PAPILIO (NEW SERIES) April 28 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 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.