Dark Green Fritillary
I took this photograph at about 8am while it was warming itself up in the morning sunshine among the dew-soaked grass in the North Yorks Moors. The Dark Green Fritillary is the commonest and most widespread of our eight resident fritillaries in Britain, but they are still not what I would call a common butterfly. And they can be infuriatingly difficult to photograph, rarely settling, and when they do it is often deep among the grass. The scientific name aglaja was one of the three Graces who personified elegance and beauty. Interestingly the other two Graces (Euphrosyne and Athalia) had British fritillaries named after them too. The generic name Argynnis comes from Argynnus, a lady beloved by Agammemnon, who built a temple in her honour after she died. Aphrodite (Venus) was worshipped here, so Argynnis came to be used as an epithet for Aphrodite.
The original name was Darkned (sic) Green Fritillary, showing it was the butterfly that was dark, rather than the shade of green on the underwings. That's why the name doesn't have a hyphen like most fritillaries.
Dark Green Fritillary
I took this photograph at about 8am while it was warming itself up in the morning sunshine among the dew-soaked grass in the North Yorks Moors. The Dark Green Fritillary is the commonest and most widespread of our eight resident fritillaries in Britain, but they are still not what I would call a common butterfly. And they can be infuriatingly difficult to photograph, rarely settling, and when they do it is often deep among the grass. The scientific name aglaja was one of the three Graces who personified elegance and beauty. Interestingly the other two Graces (Euphrosyne and Athalia) had British fritillaries named after them too. The generic name Argynnis comes from Argynnus, a lady beloved by Agammemnon, who built a temple in her honour after she died. Aphrodite (Venus) was worshipped here, so Argynnis came to be used as an epithet for Aphrodite.
The original name was Darkned (sic) Green Fritillary, showing it was the butterfly that was dark, rather than the shade of green on the underwings. That's why the name doesn't have a hyphen like most fritillaries.