I noticed a caterpillar on the milkweed. It wasn’t difficult to see it because it was fairly large with bright yellow, black and white stripes along with two long sensory filaments on the head and two more on the rump.

My identification was that it is the caterpillar of a monarch butterfly. However, every identification is basically a guess - an educated guess, but still a guess. You see a bird and you note different characteristics and based upon those, you “guess” what kind of bird it is. At times you are wrong, particularly if it is a type of sparrow or shorebird.

Just to be sure that I wasn’t wrong in my identification of the monarch caterpillar I took my phone out and using my iNaturalist app took its picture. The app told me that it was the caterpillar of the tiger milkweed butterfly. I had never heard of a tiger milkweed butterfly.

I “Googled” tiger milkweed butterfly and saw that it is a group of about 12 different butterflies that are found worldwide. Here in the U.S. there are three. There is the soldier butterfly. I know the caterpillar I was looking at was not a soldier butterfly because the soldier butterfly caterpillar has three pair of sensory filaments, one pair on the head, one mid-body, and one on the rump. Besides, it is found only in southern Florida and southern Texas.

I also knew it wasn’t a queen butterfly caterpillar because, again, the queen caterpillar has three sets of sensory filaments, not two like the one I was looking at. Lastly, the third tiger milkweed butterfly that we have is the monarch. I was right; I just didn’t recognize the name “tiger milkweed butterfly”.

This was the case for a young Swedish botanist by the name of Carolus Linnaeus. He traveled all over Europe and everywhere he went were familiar plants, but the locals called them by different names. He decided that some form of standardization was needed. He developed the “Binomial System of Nomenclature”. In this system you have a group name, which is the “genus” and a specific name, the “species”. He decided that the names should be in Latin because no country used Latin as its basic language. It was the “Language of Scholars”.

Hence under this system the name for humans is genus “Homo”, meaning “like” and “sapiens” meaning “god”. By scientific conviction the genus is always capitalized and the species is never capitalized. The entire name is set aside either with quotes or italics. Thus, we are “Homo sapiens”, the ones like god.

The genus name for all the tiger milkweed butterflies is “Danaus”, who was a mythical king. The species names, “eresimus” for the soldier butterfly was a prince, “gillippus” for the queen butterfly has an unknown origin, and “plexippus” for the Monarch butterfly was another mythical prince.

The story of Plexippus is that he was one of 50 brothers who married 50 sisters. The father of the sisters was not happy with the arrangement and ordered the girls to kill their husbands on their wedding night. All did so, except Hypermnestra, who spared Plexippus.

Today I learned we have three different tiger milkweed butterflies. I also learned another story from Greek mythology. I guess I’m not too old to learn something new!