Melitaea ornata

Melitaea ornata (Melitaea telona) is a butterfly in the family Nymphalidae. Its common name is Jerusalem fritillary. The species rank of Melitaea ornata (type location Guberlya, Russia) was only very recently recognised in two publications by Russell, et al. in 2005 and 2007. The taxonomy of the ’Melitaea phoebe’ group has been revised by Tóth & Varga (2011). According to these results M. telona Fruhstorfer, 1908 is conspecific with M. ‘phoebe’ ornata Christoph, 1893. Thus, M. telona considered a junior synonym of M. ornata.

M. ornata has a disjunct distribution in the central part of the Palearctic region. This species has been found in southern Italy including Sicily, Balkan Peninsula some part of the Carpathian Basin, Anatolia, Levant, northern Iran, Volgograd region and southern Urals in Russia and in the eastern part of Kazakhstan close to the Chinese border (Tóth & Varga 2011). Its separation from Melitaea phoebe was mostly based on larval characters. M. ornata larvae have a brick red head from the fourth larval instar and they are monophagous or oligophagous, feeding on different Asteraceae species, mainly on regionally different, sometime local endemic Centaurea species. M. phoebe on the other hand is oligophagous and its head capsule is always black. Tóth & Varga (2011) published an identification key of the ‘M. phoebe group’ as an electronic supplement in Zoologischer Anzeiger. Russell et al. suggested that the name punica was erroneously used by many taxonomists as a senior synonym of telona. Thus, Melitaea punica (Type location Lambessa, Algeria) occurs in North Africa only. These results were also confirmed by genetic studies based on the analysis of one mitochondrial and two nuclear genes in several species of the M. phoebe-group by Leneveu, et al. in 2009 and also by enzyme electrophoresis in the case of M. phoebe and M. ornata kovacsi (a Hungarian subspecies) by Pecsenye, et al. in 2007.