Talk:Speckled wood (butterfly)

Confusing sentences edit

I am confused by the following sentences:

Males have either 3 or 4 upper hindwing eyespots; the fourth spot shows only in flight. It appears that the 4-spotted morph tends towards patrolling behaviour to finds mates. This agrees with the probable function of the eyespots to entice predators like birds to aim for the wing margin (which may be damaged without much affecting the butterfly) rather than the body. On the other hand, habitat is apparently a major factor influencing mate-finding strategy as perching behavior is more common in males of conifer woodland, whereas males of meadows tend towards patrolling behavior.

The way it's written makes it unclear what agrees with the probable function of the eyespots. Do the four spot morphs only inhabit meadows? If so it would make more sense to rearrange this section with the bit about the probable function of the eyespots at the end. Richerman (talk) 23:26, 6 August 2011 (UTC)Reply


Review: This article was very informative; however, I did find it quite difficult to read. I found several grammar mistakes, and I wasn't able to fix all of them. The author of this article also has a tendency to begin a lot of sentences with the word 'However' when it is not necessary and that can be distracting for the reader. I also broke down the article into several chunks because it was dense and hard to follow. Finally, I added a 150 word subsection on territoriality and wing asymmetry; it after the territoriality section. NK2015 (talk) 23:10, 25 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

Behavior section edit

I am a student in a behavioral ecology course at Washington University in St. Louis. As part of this course, I will be editing this page, focusing mainly on behavior. Since the paragraph mentioned above was confusing, and I cover the topics mentioned extensively in my well research section, I have deleted the paragraph. Abuatois (talk) 00:19, 24 October 2013 (UTC)Reply


Hey, I separated the behavior section into multiple components. I believe the behavior section was generally too vague so I broke it down into multiple parts.Npatel92 (talk) 21:23, 31 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

You have some great information in this article. I made a couple minor grammatical edits, but overall I think some of your sections could be chunked down into smaller subsections: “Growth and development subheading under life history, and minor subheadings for “Mating system” and “Territoriality.” I also think having an overall “Behavior” section would be good to include these two sections. You also mention males are smaller – are there any reasons for this (different emergence times, any advantage for a small male, etc.)? Jenniferreed1510 (talk) 21:50, 31 October 2013 (UTC) JenniferReed1015Reply

This article is not ready for GA assessment yet edit

This article is not yet ready for GA assessment as, for a start, it immediately fails the requirements of WP:LEAD where it says "The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important aspects...significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article.". For instance in the the lead section it says that the speckled wood is "found in and on the borders of woodland areas throughout much of the Palearctic ecozone" but this is not mentioned in the Habitat section and is not referenced. The lead then goes on to talk about subspecies that are not discussed later in the article. The lead should be a summary of what is in the article and should not be full of information that is not given elsewhere. Also, nominations can only be made by registered users so, as this one was made by an anonymous IP, I've withdrawn it. Richerman (talk) 18:18, 8 November 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi all,

I am pretty sure the larva in the picture is not from Pararge aegeria. Not only the flower shown is not part this species diet but, more importantly the larva depicted does not have prolegs in several of its segments. 93.108.149.125 (talk) 18:46, 30 August 2015 (UTC)Luis Teixeira da CostaReply

Yeah, whatever that was, it wasn't a P. aegeria larva. I replaced it with one my own P. aegeria photos. If anyone has a better photo, they're welcome to change it. Mabolle (talk) 07:45, 29 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Assessment comment edit

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Speckled wood (butterfly)/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Has all the elements required to make a good article. But work needs to be done to position these under preper headings --Viren 17:57, 10 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Substituted at 01:14, 12 June 2016 (UTC)