Daedalma inconspicua Butler

Pyrcz, Tomasz W., Greeney, Harold F., Willmott, Keith R. & Wojtusiak, Janusz, 2011, 2898, Zootaxa 2898, pp. 1-68 : 31

Daedalma inconspicua Butler

Daedalma inconspicua Butler, 1866: 77 .

Daedalma inconspicua Butler ; Butler, 1868: 183; Kirby, 1871: 107; Thieme, 1906: 137; Weymer, 1912: 266.

Remarks: Daedalma inconspicua is very similar to D. drusilla , and characters useful for distinguishing the two species are discussed under the latter species. Daedalma inconspicua is a polytypic species. Males of the various subspecies can be recognised by size and by the amount and shape of the pale yellow on the FWV. Females differ more markedly by their dorsal reddish or yellow patterns, similar to the females of D. drusilla . Locally occurring subspecies distributed throughout Ecuador, extreme northern Peru and Colombia show intricate distributional patterns. Pacific and Amazonian slope faunas of cloud forest butterflies, including populations of Daedalma , are geographically widely isolated in northern and central Ecuador by the Andes, with ridges rising above 4000–5000 m covered with páramo grassland vegetation and a dry inter-Andean valley at 2500–3000 m. However, in southern Ecuador the Andean Cordillera is lower and there is no inter-Andean plateau, but instead a complex system of relatively low and narrow ranges descending below 2500 m at some of the lowest passes. The orography is highly complicated and it is difficult to identify the main Andean ridge. The lowest point between the watersheds of the Amazon and the Pacific Ocean some kilometres south of Loja is situated at merely 2450 m. Such a topography affects the distribution patterns of Daedalma taxa, with otherwise isolated populations potentially coming into contact in southern Ecuador. Such contact is facilitated by the behaviour of Daedalma species , which are less sedentary than most other pronophilines. They may sometimes fly over long distances, with some specimens having been collected over páramo, some distance from the nearest cloud forest. Occasional dispersal may lead to gene flow between western and eastern slopes populations, and indeed there are specimens whose phenotypes suggest that hybridisation at the subspecific level does occur. This phenomenon is particularly clear in D. inconspicua , an uppermost forest species.