zdufran's Favorites

One of the few truly green Noctuids. I'd previously encountered the species not far away in the Rita Blanca NG in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/107319703

Well this gaudy Tortricid turns out to be pretty interesting. It is a member of a diverse set of moths which have converged in a mimicry complex with the overall pattern of orange wings with bold black-and-white marginal banding. Other members of this complex are in this genus, related genera, and even in other moth families. Franziska Bauer created an array of images of some members of this mimicry complex (images from BOLD) and uploaded it to Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/franziskabauer/25772488391
Some of these, particularly the Tortricids, can be confusingly similar, with minor variations on this color scheme, wing shape, venation, etc.
This species was originally described from Guatemala by Walsingham in Biologia Centrali-Americana, Heterocera, Vol. 4, p. 214, 270, Tab. 8, fig. 8 (1909-1915). I finally tracked down a relatively recent revision of this genus by Obraztsov (Proc. US Nat. Mus. 119, No. 3543, 1966). His key allows me to fairly readily key this out to Idolatteria simulatrix, but even at the time of his revision, the species was only known from the original holotype from Guatemala. I subsequently found another example from nearby in El Salvador on iNat which appears to match this species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86929756
Here's a link to the Obraztsov paper:
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/16916/USNMP-119_3543_1966.pdf%3Bjsessionid=FA96FE806EF6C41C0C1BE6D9AF4A35C9?sequence=1

We had just gotten through a brief violet thunderstorm when our neighbors called us and said there was a fox on their back deck. The bedraggled, wet animal had curled up on their patio furniture not 15 ft from the back door. The fox stayed long enough for us to come over and take some pics. It seemed quite unconcerned about our presence right inside the big glass doors.