Monique Keiran: For butterflies, mythology lives on in descriptive names.
We can thank a 312-year-old Swede for making a harmless bug-hunting hobby seem like tempting fate with capricious Greek gods. In the mid-1700s, Carl Linnaeus revamped the way we classify, categorize and name living things in related groups. He leaned heavily on the Greek and Roman classics when he named the butterfly groups.
And so we have the Parnassian butterflies — found in mountain meadows — and the Satyrids, Nymphalids and Danaianids, as well as species such as Danaus plexippus, Polygonia faunus, Parnassium phoebus and Phoebis sennae. These are scientific names, based on the two-named system to distinguish genus-plus-species that Linnaeus put in place and is still used in biology today.
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