Defense
Aside from general differences in distribution, ''V. annabella'' can be distinguished from the other two painted ladies of North America as follows:Most conspicuously, it lacks obvious ventral eyespots on the hindwings; there are two large ones on ''V. virginiensis'' and four small ones on ''V. cardui''. Like the latter, it also lacks a white dot in the pinkish-orange subapical field of the ventral and dorsal forewings. Its upperwing coloration has the purest orange of the three; the American painted lady is usually quite reddish.
A less reliable indicator is the row of black eyespots on the dorsal submarginal hindwing. These are usually of roughly equal size in ''V. cardui'' and lack blue centers, though the summer morph may have a few tiny ones. In the other two, usually two eyespots are larger and have more conspicuous blue centers. In ''V. virginiensis'', these normally are the spot at each end of the row, whereas in the present species it is the two middle ones.
⟶ ''See also'' Painted Lady
References:
Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.
