katie12

That is such a cool looking spider! I have a new appreciation for spiders thanks to everyone's great close up shots.

According to the Wikipedia description, it is a male of the species mating with the short-lived pupal stage of a female. The female then lays eggs on the remains of the cocoon. Wow, strange and beautiful!

Looks like a type of Evening Primrose

Have you looked at the Great Basin Fritillary Speyeria egleis? What tools should I be using to differentiate between species of Frittilarys? They are all so remarkably similar

Thank you Arne.roysland and Mark Ridgway for your suggestions. I keep getting stumped when I look at how much yellow is on the wings and how filled in the dark brown edge of the hindwing is. Is this one of those butterflies that is nearly impossible to ID without a picture of the underside of the wing as well?

Thank you LivanEscudero for your assistance in identifying this butterfly. It's such a sweet little butterfly.

Thank you SukanyaDatta! I loved reading about this butterfly in your link.

This was a fun project to do with my 6 year old daughter, Pearl, she input most of the data.

Thank you Brian38 for helping me ID this species. New to butterfly identification. :)