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Elzunia humboldt

if you look at Elzunia humboldt on butterfliesofamerica, you can see that :

E. h. albomaculata from Central Ecuador looks just like judsoni from North Peru, but… right between these two flies cassandrina, which is very different;

you also see that under the E. h. humboldt and E. h. bomplandii headings, you have many different phenotypes that obviously cannot belong to one subspecies.

then you have atahualpa, joycei and regalis, those ssp with a white or yellow band on the hindwing upperside, atahualpa flying in NE Peru, along with judsoni ? the other two flying in Colombia, along with humboldt and bomplandii ?

how could that be ?

if you focus on Sangay NP, between 1700 and 2000 meters, the situation is just as bad :

officially we only have two subspecies :
- E. h. albomaculata in the North, particularly in the upper Pastaza valley,
- and E. h. cassandrina from the Macas area

(it should be noted that these two ssp come from the first two roads built across the Andes in this particular area)

but in fact :
- between Macas and the Pastaza valley, where there is no road, we found specimens halfway between albomaculata and cassandrina ;
- and in the Rio Paute valley, where there is a newer road, we found an extreme form of cassandrina, with a narrower HW yellow band
- and recently, while exchanging with Jean-François le Crom who's presently working on Elzunia humboldt, we went through our old specimens and discovered that the albomaculata situation in the upper Pastaza valley is not that clear , with sympatry between specimens looking exactly like the so called Elzunia coxeyi and others looking like typical official albomaculata?

from North to South the Park is 150 km, and we may well have a cline over that distance ; we’ve not been able to carry our investigation much further because these four areas seem to be the only ones where we can reach the necessary elevation of 1700 m ; we did not find any other access.

to get back to the global picture, we would very much appreciate getting Elzunia humboldt pictures with precise data, and particularly from Colombia.

and we would also very much appreciate Heliconius hecuba pictures as we found an identical situation with this similar looking Heliconius.