Smith's Blue Butterfly: This butterfly was discovered in 1948 at the mouths of Buck and Dolan creeks, on the Big Sur coast, by two U.C. Berkeley undergraduates, Rudi Mattoni and Claude Smith. It appeared to be a butterfly they had never seen before, so Mattoni collected some for future study. A few years later, Claude Smith was swept to sea and perished while fishing at Half Moon Bay. He had not yet finished his dissertation of the day-flying moth genus Annaphila. When Rudi Mattoni formally described the butterfly to science (Mattoni 1955) — as a subspecies of the widespread Dotted Blue Philotes enoptes — he named this butterfly in tribute to his friend Claude Smith. In 1975 |
