wingspan :
this butterfly is obviously Altinote (hilaris ?) desmiala female, but :
1 - we found it just below the mountain pass on the Loja-Zamora road, very far from its known range,
2 - and a few hundred meters from a spot where we collected several Altinote hilaris hilaris (fact sheet 407).
in Ecuador we always found A. hilaris desmiala in the North, from the NW, Nono/Tandayapa, and the NE, la Bonita, down to the upper Pastaza valley (it could also fly in Colombian deep South).
and in the South, from the Macas-Atillo road to the Loja-Zamora road, we found exclusively A. hilaris hilaris.
and last, farther South, Yangana and Northern Peru, we always found the A. hilaris ssp ilustrated on fact sheet 408.
so everything was perfectly clear, but this specimen does shake today's certainties, and we should again consider that maybe desmiala is not a ssp of hilaris ?
see : https://www.andean-butterflies-mapping-the-phenotypes.eu/acraeidae/altinote-hilaris/
