Butterfly of the Week: Atrophaneura, or Pachliopta, or Papilio, Antiphus

It's Wingsday--or Wednesday. Time for the Long And Short Reviews question of the week, which is "What do you eat on an average day?" This question is just slightly abrasive to me, for reasons Long And Short Reviews could not have anticipated. I used to like to cook. I used to enjoy explaining the word "celiac" as a gene found in Ireland that causes a love of cooking with potatoes, rice, corn, and anything else but wheat. What being a Celiactivist used to mean to me was testing and sharing naturally gluten-free recipes. Then farmers were allowed by Big Government and encouraged by Big Business to spray glyphosate directly onto food. This vile practice has not yet been criminalized. Glyphosate-tainted food makes me sick in the same distinctive way wheat gluten does, only moreso, and there were a few years when I hardly dared to eat anything but plain rice with garlic and/or onion and/or chicken. I like all of those foods, but too much is too much of anything and I still don't dare eat a lot of foods I loved and miss, like spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, celery, grapes, and broccoli. Most days I still eat some combination of rice, chicken, garlic, and onion. 

I have had vivid dreams about eating vegetables, especially tomatoes, and awakened salivating in the middle of the night.

So I think this web site had better call it "Wingsday" and stick to butterflies. 

A child of many names is dearly loved, some say. The butterfly known to the most up-to-date web sites as Pachliopta antiphus has had many names. As a Swallowtail, it was first classified as Papilio antiphus. Then the Red-Bodied Swallowtails were given a genus name of their own, Atrophaneura. Then the wider-tailed Red-Bodied Swallowtails were given a genus name of their own, Pachliopta. Meanwhile there have been disagreements about whether antiphus is really a distinct species, or a sub-species of Atropheneura or Pachliopta aristolochiae. In English it's been called the Black Rose, or Black Common Rose, or on Borneo the Bornean Common Rose, or in the Philippines the Palawan Rose, or, since any vine in the genus Aristolochia may be called a pipevine, the Pipevine Swallowtail of Singapore. 

Photographed in Malaysia, with shadow, and donated By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE - Bornean Common Rose (Pachliopta antiphus), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40738791

One species with which P. antiphus is not easily confused is the Pipevine Swallowtail of North America. 

Part of the confusion about this butterfly's distinction may come from an old book in which it was drawn looking quite different from other Pachliopta species. The trouble was that the drawing looks quite different from photographs of living P. antiphus, too. The under and upper sides of some butterflies' wings look completely different. Antiphus's wings look similar from above and below, that striated black-and-gray or black-and-tan effect. The smaller butterfly on the right side of this drawing looks reasonably similar to live photographed specimens. The one on the left looks as if it were drawn from a written description.

Donated by Edward Donovan - https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/82222#page/1/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29802031

Antiphus is variable and generally looks like aristolochiae. Variations have been described but there's some question about which variations are sub-species of antiphus  or whether antiphus should be considered a sub-species of aristolochiae. This web site is not an expert and has no opinion. We give Pachliopta antiphus a page because you might see the name somewhere and look for more information about it. Singapore's ButterflyCircle site features a Black Rose photographed and described as an example of aberration within a species and a discussion that book place in 2010, in which scientists confirmed that Black Rose parents produced Black Rose offspring but couldn't claim to have observed enough to say for sure that antiphus was a distinct species rather than a sub-species or mutation. On the other hand Fabricius, writing in 1793 (in Latin), saw antiphus as a distinct species. 

Photographed in Borneo by Ernst Naef.

At the PhilippineLepidopt web site, side-by-side illustrations show the difference between the Black Rose (antiphus) and Common Rose (aristolochiae) as being that aristolochiae usually has a white spot on the hind wing, and antiphus doesn't. Both have the relatively thin hind wings that are used mostly for steering while the big forewings do most of the flapping, and the tendency to "dive" when landing.

Photographed by Kara Sun, Palawan.

The species (if it is a species) is common enough over a wide enough range that some lists of endangered species classify it as "at least risk," but in the Philippines it's considered vulnerable with some sub-species being "threatened." In the past, before people thought about conservation, the red-bodied swallowtails were often collected, killed, and displayed in glass frames. Descriptions of this whole genus still mention that they were "hard to kill" without damaging the body. Photographs available online often display dead bodies in frames, showing that all the Batwings are about the same size--like our North American swallowtails, large but not huge. 

In its life cycle antiphus is thought to resemble aristolochiae. From "simple" beadlike eggs emerge dark-colored caterpillars with reddish bumps. As caterpillars and butterflies this species seems to have no hope of avoiding predators' attention by being camouflaged. They survive by advertising themselves with bright-colored toxins instead. As with most colorful insects the message seems to be "Yah, I'm an insect all right--eat me if you dare!" All the pipevines contain chemicals that are somewhat toxic to vertebrate species, though humans have used small amounts of some of these vines as medicine. The chrysalis is brownish and is considered to be camouflaged by looking like a dead leaf, at least from a distance.

Photo from the Reiman Butterfly Gardens, which received over 200 chrysalides, some of which hatched into butterflies between 2007 and 2009.

At Flickr, a site long known for offering free pictures, Chien C. Lee offers a photo of a debutante antiphus female, perched beside the empty shell of her chrysalis, wings still expanding before she flies. Chien C. Lee thinks this picture is pretty enough that people ought to pay for it. It does capture a moment in Madame Butterfly's life. Click here to see the picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25872797@N02/51313418095/in/photostream/

Despite the vulture-like red-and-black color scheme and the tradition of giving the Batwings species Halloween-themed names, both Black and Common Rose butterflies are pollinators more than composters. Butterflies have about two weeks to fly, mate, and lay eggs.