Butterfly of the Week: Atrophaneura Coon

This week's butterfly is another large, often predominantly black-winged, tropical Asian species in the swallowtail family. So it's an Atrophaneura, right? Right, say some sources. Wrong, say others; unlike the butterflies that really belong in the genus Atrophaneura, coon has tails, so it should be in a separate genus as Losaria coon. It has also been called Papilio coon by early naturalists who thought a swallowtail was a swallowtail.

Either way, the coon part is Greek and is pronounced with two syllables. 

Photo taken in Thailand, donated to Wikipedia By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119887644

Photo taken in India, donated to https://www.ifoundbutterflies.org/losaria-coon by Sanjay Sandhi. Many other photos of living butterflies of different subspecies are gathered at this site.

These butterflies have extra-long tails with spoon-shaped or knob-shaped tips, so they've been called "Common Clubtails." Because all four wings of a dead specimen can be spread out in a neat X shape, they're also nicknamed "windmills." 

The wings may look black and white, or dark grey and pale grey, or sometimes dark taupe and light taupe. They have thin stripes following the pattern of wing venation on the fore wings, and large spots, sometimes including pink, red, or yellow spots, on the hind wings. Wingspans are 3.9 to 4.7 inches, with females typically having broader wings than males, and males having longer tails.

The species is found in many parts of southern Asia and the islands near its south coast, including India, China, Bangladesh, Java, and Thailand.

Wikipedia currently lists eight subspecies: Losaria coon proper, L.c. doubledayi, L.c. cacharensis, L.c. sambilanga, L.c. delianus, L.c. palembanganus, L.c. patianus, and L.c. insperatus. A butterfly sometimes listed as Losaria coon palu has been recently recognized as a separate species, Losaria palu. A recently described subspecies is L.c. sangkapurae. Subspecies descriptions categorize color variations: sangkapurae has more black and less white on the hind wings, and has small orange spots on the inside edges of the hind wings. Some argue that doubledayi should be considered a separate species. A paper explaining some of the differences among subspecies, and what makes doubledayi especially different when molecules from dead bodies are chemically analyzed, is found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7349782/. 

Caterpillars eat a vine called Apama tomentosa, which resembles the Aristolochia vines so many other swallowtails eat. They are described as being black, or reddish gray with black spots. 

Beyond a statement that males gather around flowers at the edges of forests while females flit through the forests, little information about these butterflies' life cycle and behavior has been published online. Many sites offer dead specimens. While butterflies' short lives (coon are thought to fly for only about two weeks) make it easy to find dead specimens without injuring the butterflies in any way, this web site does not recommend paying for dead butterflies, even if they are common in their native habitat.