This week's butterfly species name is another one that's not much used any more. Atrophaneura aristolochiae adamas, or Atrophaneura adamas, or Papilio adamas, or Pachliopta adamas, or the Javan or Javanese Rose, is another large dark Swallowtail found in the Asian tropics. On recent checklists it most often appears as Pachliopta adamas, accepted as a distinct species in the more recently named genus Pachliopta. Biologists have long agreed about the fact that this butterfly exists in Java and on the nearby islands Bawan and Enggano, but have disagreed about how it should be classified.
Photo from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
If they knew more about the animal, that might help. Even its name does not describe the butterfly itself but goes back to the eighteenth century naturalsts' fad for naming lifeforms after characters in ancient literature. Adamas meant "unyielding" and was a title or personification of Death. The black-winged, red-bodied butterflies were considered to look funereal and given Halloween-themed names.
The butterflies themselves, of course, don't seem to know what a lot of European naturalists called them, nor do they care. They are only butterflies. They are all about enjoying their short lives as best they can. They spend about a month eating the leaves of vines most animals can't eat; then they pupate and morph into butterflies, after which they usually fly for about two weeks, sipping flower nectar and, if possible, mating and laying eggs. Female butterflies travel far and wide, looking for a separate vine on which to place each egg, because most of the large butterfly species are not gregarious.
Adamas differs from the other Roses only slightly. It has the same big black-and-gray forewings as the other Roses, relatively thin hind wings with four little white crescent-shaped spots around the edges. Google translates Zinken's description of the butterfly, which was written in German, thusly:
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Close to the inside of these spots is a triangular flesh-red spot with a black dot in the middle, and in front of the posterior edge a series of large, kidney-shaped, dull rusty-red spots. Below is the drawing as above, only on the front wings a little lighter and on the hind wings the flesh-red spot on the inner edge and the rusty kidney spots in front of the rear edge are colored blood-red.
The feelers are. black. The head is black with a blood-red forehead. and buttons. Neck and brisket black, with a blood-red line running on both sides from the neck across the breast, just below the point of the wings, to the abdomen. The abdomen is black with a blood-red tip, below two blood-red longitudinal lines and similar incisions.
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Zinken noted that males are usually a little smaller than females, and that these Swallowtails are closely mimicked by another butterfly species that lack the "tails" on the hind wings.
For those who want to see a picture of how adamas differs from other Pachliopta species, black-and-white drawings can be viewed at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian-Schulze/publication/282029603_Identification_key_of_the_genus_Pachliopta_Order_Lepidoptera_Family_Papilionidae/links/5601ae9408aed9851827ca38/Identification-key-of-the-genus-Pachliopta-Order-Lepidoptera-Family-Papilionidae.pdf .
About the early life of the Javan Rose, the information I found consisted of a study printed in Treubia finding that Pachliopta adamas and Troides helena, which eat the same food plants, "survived poorly" when they had to share actual plants. Adamas caterpillars and chrysalids look similar to aristolochiae.
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