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Photo#11323
Alicia? - Asterocampa celtis - male

Alicia? - Asterocampa celtis - Male
Farm west of Ocala, Marion County, Florida, USA
April 12, 1990
What is the status of Asterocampa? Is there A.alicia in peninsular Florida or is this a light form of A.celtis?

Moved
Moved from Hackberry Emperor.

Alicia?
None of my books mention A. alicia. I did a web search and noticed that it appears to be a subspecies of A. celtis. I'm not sure what the differences are, but it seems like you could call this A. celtis either way.

 
Alicia
You can download a (large!) article revising Asterocampa at this site. Essentially, alicia is the wrong name for this taxon - it was previously used for Florida populations but it actually belongs to coastal Louisiana populations which the author of the paper (Friedlander) lumps with A. celtis celtis. He describes the subspecies present in peninsular FL and coastal GA and SC as A. c. reinthali - which is larger, with some differences in colouration and pattern from the widespread nominate subspecies. I've heard that there may be some additional species in Asterocampa that may be recognized as full species in the future, but I don't know if this subspecies is one of them.

 
interesting article
Here is a paper that has some interesting insight into subspecies reinthali. It presents some evidence in support of species status for reinthali, but it is far from conclusive. It is a question that would be interesting to study further. The individual in this photo seems to be very typical of the subspecies.

Some things that I notice about the subspecies are the smaller darker separate spots in the discal cells, particularly in the hind wing, less inclined to be mere outlines. On the forwing there is (usually or always?) only one eye spot, without even the indications of a second one. The overall coloring is rich and darker than average for the species A. celtis. They tend to be large for the species too.

http://tils-ttr.org/ttr/ttr-1-5.pdf

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