Celastrina lucia confusion

I did eventually get Dr. Wright’s email address and sent him a message this morning about both lucia and serotina to which he promptly responded:

"Serotina may or may not occur in Canada. It surely does in southern New England thru New York & Pennsylvania. In that region it is morphologically different than lucia in terms of male forewing scales and androconia. It also flies after the flight of lucia and utilizes a handful of hosts (besides mite galls). And laboratory rearing yields pupae that eclose later than lucia pupae following winter diapause.

There are probably several lucia clades throughout North America. Whether they are all good species, I doubt. To me the most distinctive ones are in Alaska and in the aforementioned area in southern New England, etc. It was good fortune that the serotina holotype (R.I.) is sympatric with such a distinctive lucia. This lucia lacks androconia and has evolved a new scale on the male forewing. Since it shares this trait with ladon, it might even be considered a northern subspecies of ladon. Let's wait to see what the genomic study unveils. (There are some Canadian specimens in that study too.)

The Ontario lucia is lucia Kirby and it is different than the aforementioned lucia in New England, etc. I have spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the journals of the naturalists who collected in Canada in the 1820s and subsequently gave their specimens to Kirby to describe. This has narrowed down the possible locations and host they found. Unfortunately, Kirby's specimens including types are lost. Fortunately we have a decent illustration.”

He cautions that a "major collaborative genomic study of Celastrina is underway” and we may want to hold off on making changes. I’ll update the species pages to reflect this information but I’m not informed enough to move images. I agree, it seems like any images identified as lucia outside of eastern Ontario and boreal US should probably be removed from lucia. I’m open to suggestions as to where they should be placed. Based on Schmidt & Layberry 2016, I think images from Ontario placed in serotina should be removed until it can be shown that the species does exist there. Not sure where to stop, though. It seems like all identifications might need to be individually reevaluated, ladon and neglecta too. Alternatively, we could follow Dr. Wright’s advice literally and do nothing but who knows when that next paper will be released.

is that Tony Thomas would occasionally group and send the new Celastrina images to Dr David Wright who would identify them and then Tony would place them into the guide. We don't know how the Celastrina have been identified since Tony stopped helping here.

I really don't know anything about Celastrina but I see a couple new papers which may help. The first, Schmidt & Layberry 2016, can be downloaded here. I think this is addressed on p. 137 in which is says: "... Populations south of the boreal region, where adults are slightly larger and with a more variable ventral wing pattern, have been treated as a separate taxon (C. “lucia” of authors), also considered to be a univoltine spring-flying species (Pratt et al. 1994, Pavulaan 2014). There is currently no available scientific name for this taxon, nor is it clear that one is needed, as it may merely represent ecophenotypic variation of boreal C. lucia..."

The Pavulaan 2014 paper can be found here. It seems to recognize lucia Auctorum as distinct but it doesn't seem to be formally addressed as such in the conclusion. I'm guessing the southern images should be left as is or moved to genus since identification is so complicated.

Regardless, I will add this information to the Info pages. I hope one of the Butterfly experts will see this post and help clean it up. The two papers also indicate other changes should be made at BugGuide. For starters, it appears that most of the images in C. serotina should be moved since that species has been removed from the Canada checklist (Schmidt & Layberry 2016, p. 135).