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Photo#921769
Unknown  butterfly - Chlosyne palla

Unknown butterfly - Chlosyne palla
Placerville, El Dorado County, California, USA
May 11, 2014

Images of this individual: tag all
Unknown  butterfly - Chlosyne palla Unknown  butterfly - Chlosyne palla

This is a Palla Checkerspot
Chlosyne palla palla. C. hoffmanni is similar looking and closely related, but in the Sierra Nevada it looks different from this.

Nice comparison here at same post as previous thumbnail, but remember both are varied in coloring (particularly C. palla.


Moved from Butterflies (excluding skippers).

Moved
Moved from ID Request.

Checkerspot
It looks like a Checkerspot, maybe one of ssp. of the Variable Checkerspot, Euphydryas chalcedona.
Compare .

 
Chlosyne hoffmanni
I still believe this looks more like Hoffmann's Checkerspot. Chlosyne hoffmanni. If you compare the second open winged picture to Hoffmann's then the comparison is more evident. But I have to say that my experience with insects leaves a lot to be desired, so I will bow to anyone with more knowledge than I, which is just about everyone. My dyslexia is showing, misspelled Chloysne corrected to chlosyne.

 
Not sure
The Hoffman's Checkerspot looks much darker to me, maybe David will check in on this one.
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My conjecture not based on dark or light
My conjecture not based on dark or light but on the shape (outline) of the different checkerspots, especially those on the leading edge of the front wing. If after comparing those, then you factor in shading, such as which is bright yellow and which is a darker brown or orange, then I think it still leads you to Hoffman's. But for my part, it is still a conjecture and should be taken with a grain of salt. (edit - I added the orange after the brown, since that is really the color difference in this individual) further edit- Also I think you could take the open winged picture, put it in an editor, invert it, and darken it and that would make for a pretty close resemblance to the dark form you are thinking it should look like. But I don't think that you could do that for any of the other checkerspots from his locality. My reticence in thinking that this might be something else is that there are so many different butterfly species that resemble each other, that there might be another species out there that I don't know about and could be this one. But if you are comparing it to a list of species from the county of El Dorado county CA from Moths and Butterflies of NA, then Hoffman's could only be the one.

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