The Butterfly Family. It has taken some decades for the promise of DNA-based analysis to reach maturity. Recently, the family relationships of butterflies have been much clarified, an effort drawing on the work of multiple international contributors. But this work has not been just intellectual—for the speaker it has opened a path to better understanding some long confusing tangles of butterfly groups, especially in the Neotropics. Join Rick as he walks through the recent findings, illustrated with photos of some of the planet’s most exquisite organisms.
An active field naturalist, author, and photographer, Rick Cech is an affiliate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Entomology. He is the principal author and photographer of Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer’s Guide (Princeton, 2005), and wrote A Distributional Checklist of the Butterflies and Skippers of the New York City Area.