The Long & Short Reviews prompt for this Wednesday was "Something I'm Proud of Doing."
Something I'm proud of doing, at the time of writing, is not spending a lot of your time wailing about what a miserable winter this one obviously and necessarily is. We've lost Grandma Bonnie Peters, we've lost Adayahi, we've lost my Significant Other, and everyone else at this blog has been ill. I'm the only one who's not been in the hospital. If I start wailing I may not be able to stop in time to be useful, so the wailing officially ends here.
Tomorrow will be a good time to consider the accomplishments other people have posted, though, and people not doing the Long & Short Reviews are welcome to add their accomplishments in the comments section.
Today seems like a good day to consider a butterfly, so let's consider Atrophaneura atropos, which has also been known as Papilio and Pachlioptera atropos and is now listed in the newest documents as Pachliopta atropos.
Where did it get those names, you might wonder. Scientists don't have to explain, or know, the meanings of the names they give the species they formally describe to other scientists. Often they name species after themselves or their friends. However:
Papilio is the usual Latin word for "butterfly." In Latin it did not originally mean only a Swallowtail butterfly, but in modern scientific usage it does.
Atrophaneura breaks down into three Latin and Greek words, atro meaning black, phan meaning to show, and neura meaning nerves. (Greek dictionaries also list eura, meaning justice, which hardly describes an insect.) Atropos breaks down into atro and pos, meaning "black foot," but in Greek mythology Atropos, the Lady of the Black Foot, was the one of the three Fates whose job was to snip the thread of life--that Halloween theme again. The dark color of the Batwings reminded early naturalists of the dark coats people wore at funerals, and a New Zealand site lists this species as "Mourning Swallowtail" though they're still looking for a clear picture of one.
Photo donated to Wikipedia anonymously. No explanation of the "false eye" spot on one wing and not the other was offered. These spots have not been solidly identified as a gender indicator, though asymmetrical wing spots indicate gender confusion in some swallowtail species.
It's black, it shows its "nerves" or wing veins clearly, and it has black feet.
But nobody seems to recognize Pachliopta as a Greek or Latin word or combination of both. Pach, according to Google, may mean "thick," but liopta is not in the dictionary. Wings, which aren't particularly thick, would be ptera; as in Pachlioptera; the tails, which are thick compared with other swallowtails', would be cauda. In view of the wings' textured look it makes some sense that Pachliopta might be an abbreviation for Pachlioptera.
Anyway, this "black-footed" batwing swallowtail is found in the Philippine islands. It's not as big as some of the batwings, with a wingspan of 8 to 9 cm, not all of four inches. It was never common and is now threatened. Most photos of it are of dead specimens in museums. This healthy-looking individual was living in captivity.
Photo By David Morris, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9346596
Some endangered species lists say all of the red-bodied swallowtails are "of concern." Threatened Swallowtail Butterflies of the World has a section for atropos that acknowledges that nobody seems to know for sure even what it eats. Mentioning that the species survives, in smaller numbers, in clear-cut forests, the author observes that evidently the food plant "can survive in secondary woodland." The caterpillars of several similar species look somewhat alike, but nobody's claiming to have reared atropos and know for certain how its young look or behave. Scientists expect that the caterpillar would look similar to last week's caterpillar, but they're not confirmed this.
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