For our guests and visitors who love nature photography, insects and arachnids, a popular spot to visit on their REGUA tours is the ‘Onofre Cunha’ forest fragment. It is one of the largest extant lowland forest fragments in the region, roughly cut in two by the paved road that connects Funchal to Guapiaçu. Despite having suffered selective logging, hunting and some degradation by surrounding agricultural activities, many interesting, rare or hard-to-find species can still be seen with some regularity (as opposed to reforested areas that exhibit much population fluctuations) and many new records over the years have originated there.
It is no surprise, then, that after 12 years of regular visits, sampling, and monitoring of butterflies in this fragment, a specimen of the rarest of South America's emperor butterflies (genus Doxocopa) suddenly appeared, showing itself in a sunny spot on the trail in the early morning for long enough to be photographed! Doxocopa laurona is an endemic species of the Atlantic Forest known only from half a dozen locations scattered throughout the South and Southeast of Brazil, from sea level to about 900 m: the Rio Doce valley (states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo), Petrópolis (type locality), and forested hills in the lake region from Saquarema to Cabo Frio (RJ), Antonina (PR) and Joinville (SC).
The photo above depicts an unmistakable male of Doxocopa laurona, which belongs to a group of four species where both sexes are mimetic of Adelpha (generally only the females of Doxocopa resemble Adelpha). In this group, only the males of three of them have the typical purple-violet reflection according to the wing openinng angle. Thus, it is easy to distinguish the males of D. laurona from those of the most common and widespread species of the group – Doxocopa linda – since, like the females, the males of the latter lack this purple-violet reflection. Interestingly, this later species flies throughout continental Tropical America along with the other species in the group whose males have the reflex, while these reflexive species have mutually exclusive geographic distributions, with no overlap in their respective flight areas. Given that the violet reflex of males is a secondary sexual characteristic that probably guides the respective females in the selection of the appropriate conspecific male, it helps avoiding hybridization between distinct species in nature. This would explain why D. linda is the only species that flies together with all the purplish ones, given that its males unmistakable lack that reflex, thus sharing territory locally with D. laurona over South and Southeast of Brazil.
On the same day, a female from this group was spotted during monitoring on the same trail, originally identified as D. linda. However, as it turned out, it could either be that one or a female of D. laurona (previously unknown in the area), because all females are devoid of violet reflection and very similar to each other.
Date: 11/04/22
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