This week's butterfly is an endangered species: Pachliopta (or Atrophaneura) jophon (sometimes yophon), the Ceylon (or Malabar or Srilankan) Rose. "Malabar Rose," though often shown as an alternate nickname for P. jophon, is a better nickname for a similar-looking species found in India. "Bong Butterfly" is a nickname found online; due to heavy commercial interest in smoking pipes I wasn't able to learn whether this originated as a traditional Asian name, or a reference to a design or trademark, but it's been adopted as a screen name.
Photograph from the Swallowtail & Birdwing Butterfly Trust.
Once again, the rose swallowtail group were classified as Papilio, swallowtails, first, then given the separate genus name Atrophaneura, and then more recently given a more specific genus name, Pachliopta. More was written about Atrophaneura jophon; more recent documents were written about Pachliopta jophon. The genus names Menelaides and Tros have also been used, but not widely accepted. Google now recognizes all the genus names as synonyms and pulls up hits for all of them in one search.
The species name has consistently been jophon, sometimes spelled yophon. It comes from the early naturalists' tradition of naming plants and animals after characters in ancient literature, and naming species with "funereal" black coloration after characters associated with funerals. Jophon or Iophon was noted as the name of a Greek who died young. (If you're a hopeless word-nerd and search for definitions of words and names online, you'll find that, much later, the increase in childhood cancer generated a medical Journal Of Pediatric Hematological Oncological Nursing. The name is clunky but the acronym does seem to fit.)
Photo donated to Wikimonde by Nayana Wijetilaka. This photo also appears on the Sri Lanka government page discussing their effort to protect the butterflies' habitat from illegal logging.
Much has been written about this butterfly because it's endangered. It lives in the rain forests of the island country now called Sri Lanka. Web pages are devoted to it around the world, in every widely used language. It seems to be surviving only in what is believed to be "virgin," or at least very old growth, forest. Both Gray and Rothschild noted that it was rarely seen and able to fly high enough to escape naturalists' nets in the nineteenth century. Too many humans want to clear this land, and the butterflies may go extinct if they do. Web sites that discuss Pachliopta jophon often cite the IUCN Red List of endangered swallowtails. This helpful book is available in real and online bookstores and can be downloaded as a PDF file.
How much does this matter? people ask. When bills have to be paid and they have a claim to a special, expensive kind of wood, how badly will a few butterflies be missed? Are they even a really unique species? They used to be regarded as a sub-species of P. hector, but the butterflies look very different and it's not positively known that the caterpillars are identical (as some illustrators suggest). P. pandiyana looks very similar. There has been some question whether pandiyana and jophon are separate species or only sub-species, but since the 1980s many scientists have recognized them as distinct species. Anyway, some scientists argued, pandiyana is at some risk too.
As in many swallowtail species, individuals vary in size and color. The wingspan is normally about four inches. Females are generally a little larger than males, and males usually show more dark color. Like the other Atrophaneura, these big butterflies rely on warning coloration rather than camouflage. Black-white-and-red coloring, produced by mildly toxic phytochemicals in their food plants, warn predators that eating one of these butterflies will cause digestive distress.
Even for sub-species, extinction is forever, and we never know how important a living thing's survival might be. Some people believe that, in giving humans "dominion" over the other animal species, God gave us responsibility for them; that it would be a sin to lose any of the kinds of creatures God created.
The Ceylon Rose seems to be numerous when, and where, it exists at all. It's still a wild animal, not known ever to have been reared in captivity. It seems to exist only in tropical rain forests where the weather is always warm and damp. Humans who get near its habitat tend to think in terms of clearing, or at least thinning, or cutting back, some of the big trees that maintain the green gloom. The wood is worth money and the air makes humans want to let a little sunshine in. The butterflies seem to need that continual green gloom. As the Red List describes it, the seasons the rest of the world call spring and autumn are a little wetter than the spring and summer months, but the southern part of Ceylon gets about 45 inches of rain a year and has no dry season.
It is believed, though not officially "known," that jophon's life cycle is very similar to those of hector and the other Atrophaneura swallowtails'. Eggs like little round yellow beads are laid, probably by ones, probably on the undersides of young Aristolochia vine leaves. Mother butterflies use sight and smell to give each egg plenty of room for a very hungry caterpillar to eat lots of leaves without damaging the vine. Caterpillars are a dark "purplish" brown in which the red, black, and white pigments they absorb from the vine are not as vividly distinct as they will be in the adult butterfly. Caterpillars have a sweetish, fruity odor, especially in the thickened segments of the "humpback" where the bit of flesh called the osmeterium is normally concealed. Without making a real cocoon, the caterpillar forms a drab unattractive pupal shell that looks a bit like a withered leaf, then emerges as a big showy butterfly. So many swallowtail butterflies around the world, including our own Pipevine Swallowtails, have life stories that fit the same outline. Probably there are some differences between the life cycle of jophon and the life cycles of the other Pachliopta species, but there's no official record of what those differences may be.
"Collection" is believed to be a factor in this species' decline, although loss o forest habitat and "pesticide" vapor drift are bigger threats. Into the late twentieth century many of us grew up thinking that the way to learn about butterflies was to fill display cases with dead bodies. People who actually study butterflies will find dead bodies. The animals don't live long. After flying for a few weeks, one day they just drop out of the air. People used to glue the wings into pictures, or try to preserve the whole bodies, as souvenirs of hours spent observing nature. Scientists who seriously studied butterflies, rearing eggs to find out what caterpillars would eat, how long the growth phases lasted, etc., would have a lot of adult specimens and, if they had found the species to be even a potential nuisance in farms or gardens, they would be obliged to kill them. Even that, as a source of museum specimens, did not harm the species. But in the "developing" countries, as technological change produced adverse social changes like dislocation, unemployment, and poverty, people started killing butterflies just to sell their bodies to "collectors" in the developed countries where the Atrophaneura looked very exotic. Some species populations survived this depredation. Jophon, already endangered...
As late as the 1990s, this site documented, Europeans were giving dead jophon males a market value around US$100 for males, $200 for females. We should never pay for dead butterflies or parts of them. As with bird feathers, flower petals, and many other things, we may acquire beautiful specimens as a sort of gift from nature for watching how these creatures live and grow, but we should not encourage any commercial trade in inedible animal carcasses. Technological development now allows us to collect butterflies with cameras. Artists can get more lifelike effects from digital "models" than from fast-moving living butterflies or fast-fading dead ones, as this page proves. It is now illegal to "collect," buy, or sell endangered species without proof that they were reared indoors in the country where they are being traded or collected. Really old museum pieces, like the one shown here, may have been legitimately taken, but at best they're faded and difficult to maintain--why bother?
At the bottom of that "collectors' secret" page someone criticizes governments' efforts to protect the threatened Atrophaneuras. The criticism of bureaucrats' efficiency and ability to enforce laws is valid, generally, worldwide. While I think some ex-colonial positions sound bitter or extreme (as with displays of ill feeling about the Queen's funeral), I think it's reasonable that poorer countries want to preserve scientific studies of their wildlife for their own scientists--or at least collect substantial payments from any foreigners they allow to participate in such studies. They have a publishing niche and a right to cling to it.
So, New Zealand, for example, now allows specimens of Pachliopta jophon or pandiyana to be imported only with "export permits from the country of origin," which aren't cheap. However well or badly the governments may use any money collected this way, at least the New Zealand government page offers a nice pithy comparison of these closely related butterflies at http://citesnz.pbworks.com/f/ID-Butterflies-PDF.pdf .
A British "Butterfly Farm" site has developed a printable coloring book that includes a Pachliopta jophon silhouette. https://www.butterflyfarm.co.uk/attraction/media/950e2c4f3834dcbb9e8c93369409ed60/ColouringBook.pdf . Parents and teachers can download and print the whole mini-book for only the expense of printing.
No comments:
Post a Comment