Art Shapiro's Butterfly Site - Habrodais en Habrodais grunus <p>A very strange <a class="glossary-term" href="/glossary/3#term169"><acronym title="The primary unit of classification below genus under the Linnaean system. For our purposes, groups of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations of individuals that share an evolutionary history and ancestry. However, there is significant debate on what exactly constitutes a species and many definitions and concepts have been proposed. The most common of these is the biological species concept, which requires that sets of populations must be able to successfully and regularly interbreed and produce viable, fertile offspring.">species</acronym></a>, often common to abundant (but occasionally rare) and demonstrably long-lived, yet not known to visit flowers (or anything else resembling a food source) at all. It has a very short <a class="glossary-term" href="/glossary/3#term158"><acronym title="The tube-like organ on the head of butterflies and moths that they use to drink fluids, like flower nectar. Lepidoptera do not have chewing mouthparts as adults and consequently do not consume solid food or grow as adults, but they definitely do as larvae!">proboscis</acronym></a>. There is a single <a class="glossary-term" href="/glossary/3#term86"><acronym title="The description of how many broods (generations) per year a particular butterfly species produces at any one location. A butterfly with one generation per year is “univoltine”. Butterflies with two generations per year are called “bivoltine” and those with more than two are generally referred to as “multivoltine”.">brood</acronym></a>, emerging in late spring to early summer, estivating in cool, shaded locations on the forest floor (e.g. inside bramble tangles), then re-emerging in autumn to breed - how do they do it? The adults are active in late afternoon and on into dusk, flying around the host tree. When they are perched in the tree they look exactly like dead leaves, and disappear. One can sometimes flush incredible numbers by agitating the tree or throwing a rock through it. There is little variation - but then, there isn't much pattern there to vary.</p> <p>Despite its apparent adaptation to the droughty Mediterranean summer and the fact that there is a sister-species confined to Baja California (<i>H. poodyi</i>), the historic roots of this butterfly apparently lie in the Old World, where all the closely-related <a class="glossary-term" href="/glossary/3#term122"><acronym title="The nested rank between family and species in the Linnaean system.">genera</acronym></a> are.</p> <p>The host is Canyon Live Oak (Goldencup Oak, Golden Oak, Maul Oak), <i>Quercus chrysolepis</i>. This oak hybridizes with the shrubby high-altitude Huckleberry Oak (<i>Q. vacciniifolia</i>) and the hairstreak also breeds on the hybrids (as at Lang Crossing, and in the Trinity Alps), but has not been found on <i>Q. vacciniifolia</i> itself. There are reports of it breeding on Chinquapin (<i>Chrysolepis</i>) and Tan Oak (Tanbark Oak) (<i>Lithocarpus</i>) as well, but not on any other species of Oak, and not at any of our sites.</p> <p><i>H. grunus</i> can be very common in the Coast Range where its host occurs, which it does not at Gates Canyon.</p> Habrodais Sun, 28 May 2006 18:09:03 +0000 admin 67 at