Apollinus means "Little Apollo" in Latin but Archon apollinus is "False Apollo" in English. It seems suitable, as stories about Apollo, the god of the sun, reflected the fact that Greeks and Romans were learning to have mixed feelings about the sun. He was clearly shown as a false god, a false friend, a false father, not a very faithful son either, and a real creep when it came to mortal women, persistently pursuing the ones who ran away and mistreating the ones who even talked to him. His "inspiration" was also blamed for false counsel, false medical treatment, and poems that even Greeks like Socrates and Plato recognized as presenting false ideas about God and the world. Members of his cult sought his "inspiration" by eating dangerous herbs and mushrooms. False Apollo indeed.
There is, however, an Apollo butterfly in the genus Parnassius. So it seems that Archon apollinus was named False Apollo merely because this Eurasian butterfly turned out to belong to a different species than the Apollo western European naturalists thought it was. We'll get to Parnassius apollo, an interesting and threatened species, eventually.
Archon apollinus is found around the border between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Adult butterflies' variations overlap with those of A. apollinarius and only recently did scientists agree that, although the butterflies can look alike, they start out as different caterpillars and don't hybridize in nature. Literature on apollinarius is scarce because, until recently, they were mixed in with apollinus. This apollinus was photographed in Turkey...
...By Zeynel Cebeci - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38398342.
They also live in Greece, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The caterpillars can eat any of several species of Aristolochia leaves. The species is classified as "near threatened," but at low risk for immediate extinction. It seems always to have been rare in some places and slightly more common in others. Butterfly watchers seem to have more trouble getting to the right place at the right time to see it than anything else.
Matt Rowlings photographed this one in Greece. In addition to this picture and the one below, several False Apollo pictures from that trip are displayed at http://www.eurobutterflies.com/sp/apollinus.php .
These butterflies are generally white with markings. Colors and patterns can vary considerably, with some consistent patterns forming sub-species variations. Hind wings can look pale tan, reddish, or yellowish. Red spots can vary from the purplish red shown to an orange-red color. Forewings can look brownish rather than greyish. Some individuals' forewings look transparent; this species' wing scales are vulnerable to wear and tear, and one subspecies seems consistently to be undersupplied with wing scales. Rowlings says that males are more prone to wing scale loss than females, possibly because they fly at higher elevations and colder temperatures.
You can see the green leaves behind this male right through most of his wings. In flight these transparent forewings make the butterflies look odd and unbalanced. So this species is easy to notice when seen, but since it flies in March and April, most visitors to its native countries won't see it. False Apollos are active at lower temperatures than most butterflies; they can fly at temperatures of 7.5 degrees C. (45 F.), though Rowlings says they seem to spend most of their time sunning their wings.
In species where males and females spend most of their time in different places, the sexes often have different ecological roles. Often females are pollinators and males are composters. Rowlings says both sexes of A. apollinus pollinate yellow composite flowers, like dandelions, but they tend to stay near olive or oak trees.
Museum specimens of this species, displayed with the wings spread apart, look very furry with long hairs on the inner edges of the hind wings as well as all over the body. Even the heads look furry
Butterflies are classified into families according to the pattern of veins in their wings, and both Apollo and False Apollo belong to the same family as our swallowtail butterflies, though their wings don't have "tails."
Eggs can look white to pale green, with dents on top. Several eggs are laid together on one stalk or leaf, showing that the caterpillars don't have that instinct to eat their cast-off shells and skins that forces some butterflies to lay only one egg on a plant.
As they grow bigger each caterpillar strikes off on its own. They still like to cover themselves and may wrap themselves in leaves held together with silk while they eat.
Pupation takes a long time for this species. They normally go underground to pupate in early summer and emerge as butterflies next spring, but they can live through another full year as pupae if conditions don't seem right for emergence. Pupae are dark, easily overlooked, but unmistakably butterfly pupae if noticed. The outlines of folded wings and segmented abdomens are visible on the pupal shell. Since the caterpillars all look for the same sort of place to pupate, all seven in the litter shown above might pupate, possibly joined by some cousins, in one patch of loose soil. They like to be covered but don't go deep underground.
Photo by Paolo Mazzei.
They're threatened, in the usual way, worldwide, by habitat loss. They eat only unimportant "weeds" (the Aristolochias aren't even significant nuisances) that grow in the sunny clearings they love. That's the trouble--those clearings have usually been cleared by humans who, these days, want to poison all the "weeds" for mechanized farming.
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