Butterfly of the Week: Crimson Rose

For those who are keeping track, the post about Byasa dasarada appeared at HowToMeowInYiddish.Blogspot.com. Atrophaneura dixoni was profiled here several weeks ago, and here is the very popular butterfly most recently called Pachliopta hector, the Crimson Rose. It was formerly called Atrophaneura hector, and, before that, Papilio hector. Menelaides and Tros have also appeared as genus names for hector but not been generally accepted. Web searches bring up more hits for Atrophaneura hector but the freshest information will be at the sites that mention Pachliopta hector. An alternative English name is "Chakkara Rose."

Everyone seems to want to photograph the Crimson Rose. This picture comes to us courtesy of Fair Use from the Polish nature site Medianauka, https://www.medianauka.pl/Pachliopta-hector .

Linnaeus defined this species: wings are tailed, blackish on both sides, the forewings with bands of white spots, the hindwings with a double row of red spots. 

"

...alis  caudatis  concoloribus  nigris :  primoribus  fascia  alba ;  posticis  maculis  rubris.     M.  L.  V.

Fai.  i7if.  194.  et  137.     Papilio  indica  maxima  nigra.

Hahitat  in  Indiis.

"

In the bad old days when people collected dead butterfly bodies (which, among other things, cause carpet beetles to infest buildings) instead of taking photographs, it was observed that the Crimson Rose is "a difficult fly to catch" because of its alertness, cleverness, and agility.

"I should like to be a beautiful butterfly,

All yellow and blue and green and red;

But I should not like

To have Dan put camphor on my poor little head,"

Louisa May Alcott had a character observe, watching an older child kill butterflies for a science project. Hector often seemed to have it both ways, blessed with better than usual abilities to dodge as well as repel predators, but people are still buying and selling these butterflies' carcasses. "Anyone who pays attention to butterflies knows where to find dead ones--individual butterflies don't live long--so what's the harm in collecting, displaying, and selling them? The wings are still pretty, and scientists may have some use for the bodies." The danger is that a species or sub-species may be pushed into extinction if cash-strapped students can sell the bodies of butterflies who did not die naturally. We should never buy butterfly carcasses.

The species name may give some indication of its popularity. Because of their dark wings, butterfly species in this genus were traditionally given names associated with funerals in some way. Hector was the name of a war hero who was finally killed in battle.("Hectoring," an old word for pushing, nagging, and bossing, derived from his reputation as a warrior. According to the Iliad this ancient war chief was rather mellow and lovable at home. He was missed.)

From a distance the wings can even look purple, as in this photo from Macroid. https://macroid.ru/showgallery.php?cat=65263&mode=box&lang=en

Or the red spots can fade toward orange.

Photo by Christoph Bausch, https://lepiforum.de/webbbs/media/forum_2_2017/3/3177_2.jpg

Is there a correlation between orange or pink tones and sex? Girishacf's snapshot suggests one. So does surfing the'Net, where gravid orange females bulge. Some scientists mention female "specimens" in which the red has faded to yellow or white. However, other snapshots of pairs show that males and females can be equally orange, like Pamsai's, below. Dead bodies fade, whether male or female. There don't seem to be true geographical "races," either. Revathy and Mathew discuss the influence of environmental factors on the size and colors of Crimson Roses at https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1052535616 . 

Pamsai's sequence of five very fast-exposure photos at https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/17084535

shows the larger butterfly (female swallowtails tend to be a little larger than males) hovering, flapping those forewings, while bracing the smaller one with the hind wings. Note that his legs are folded in, not holding on to anything. She's the only thing keeping him in the air. 

Though abundant, this butterfly would be missed, and it's protected by law in its native countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Burma/Myanmar. It is considered an endangered species in Bangladesh, though there is some question whether it's ever really been native to Bangladesh; individuals rarely breed or stay there. In India it's protected because it's a crucial pollinator for a valuable plant, Rauwolfia or Rauvolfia micrantha.

As with our Monarchs, the species is known and loved partly for travelling in large groups, so any decline in numbers is a matter of concern. Pachliopta hector is not the biggest butterfly in those countries, with a typical wingspan of four inches or a little more, again comparable to Monarchs. 

In fact hector behaves like our Monarchs in several ways. It is easy to spot, and, being a great traveller and explorer, it can be found almost everywhere, from dense tropical forests to mountain slopes. Like the Monarch, it flies slowly, close to ground, when looking for food. Its wings are big enough to be heard and to shake the leaves and flowers it visits. Also like the Monarch, the female butterflies cover great distances as they try to place one egg on each vine, thus ensuring that the caterpillars won't kill the host plant. Caterpillars can eat different species within the genus but eat only leaves that most other animals can't digest; in the case of Pachliopta hector the plant genus is Aristolochia. Like Monarchs, the caterpillar and butterfly are toxic to animals that eat them; eating one won't kill a predator but, if the predator has the ability to vomit, it probably will. When they fly higher, crossing places where they're not finding many host plants, they fly faster and sometimes form flocks; like Monarchs, they get some boost from one another's draft. Though the flocks disperse during the daytime, they roost together on tree branches at night. Flocks can include dozens or thousands of butterflies who migrate together over land as the seasons change. 

Adult butterflies live on flower nectar, and their favorite flowers are in the genus Lantana. They are a pollinator species. Gayathri Upamali Perera, who is possessive of the lovely photo essay at http://chasethedreams28.blogspot.com/2012/11/common-rose-atrophaneura-pachliopta.html , notes that they can hover, flapping the fore wings while the hind wings rest, while sipping flower nectar. 

The life cycle of the Crimson Rose is illustrated in a photo montage at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-h-Life-cycle-of-Atrophaneura-hector-Linnaeus-a-Egg-b-I-instar-larva-c-II_fig3_283786049  The egg was described by one researcher as "a miniature pumpkin" (the viable eggs of some swallowtail butterflies are beaded with microscopic drops of aristolochic acid, which discourages predation). .

Photo donated to Wikimedia Commons by Chinmayisk: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atrophaneura_hector_egg.JPG

In the tropical regions where they live, there is no real winter, and there can be seven generations of Pachliopta hector in a year. Each egg takes about a week to hatch. From the time the egg is laid to the time the butterfly takes flight, the juvenile stage of its life typically takes only forty days. Caterpillars are small relative to the size of the adult butterfly, only two to three inches long. 

Hatchling caterpillar, already warty and bristly, photo donated to Wikimedia By School of Ecology and Conservation, UAS Bangalore, India <kchandra58 @ yahoo.co.in> - School of Ecology and Conservation, UAS Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1107747 

The caterpillar's whole appearance is designed to be maximally repulsive to hungry birds. Lots of excrescences in its skin make it look difficult to bite into. Its thoracic segments are decorated with a false face. The thickened thoracic segments behind the head, though not as conspicuous in this species as in some other swallowtails, have spots that can look like eyes from some angles, and conceal the osmeterium. Under stress the osmeterium erects, looking like the tongue of the bird-eating snake the eyes suggest, and exudes a fruity odor birds dislike. However, the Crimson Rose seems to have an easygoing disposition; of four dozen specimens photographed, none seemed stressed enough by being photographed to display its osmeterium. A bird that was hungry enough to eat a black caterpillar with red warts--warning colors produced by the caterpillar's eating plant leaves that are toxic to birds--might mistake these caterpillars for little snakes and decide to avoid them. 

Photo donated By Balakrishnan Valappil - Crimson Rose_Life History_08, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67294991

The "face" in the picture above is a false face, located on the caterpillar where a collar would be on a human. The caterpillar's working eyes are closer to its mouth, on the underside of the head as the animal crawls with its face toward its food, and are not usually noticed by humans. No caterpillar's eyes are easy for predators to find.

The white "belt" that characterizes some of the other Rose caterpillars is present in this species, but less conspicuous than in the Common Rose:

Another picture By Balakrishnan Valappil - Crimson Rose_Life History_12, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67294993

In one way the caterpillar acts like a little poison-pill, too. Like many of the large butterfly and moth caterpillars, it eats its own eggshell after hatching and cast-off skin after molting. Mother butterflies don't stay around to see their babies hatch, but they do work hard to place only one egg on each host plant, so that the caterpillar will find plenty of food and not have to leave its host plant until it's ready to stop eating and pupate. Sometimes two eggs pop out together; one is wasted. In the natural course of events the caterpillar will never meet its relatives until it's an adult butterfly. When cage-reared caterpillars meet each other, they have no sense of family; their instincts tell them to eat their own skins and, when they recognize another skin of their own kind, they seem to think they'd better eat that too. People who rear these caterpillars need to provide a separate host plant for each one. Social instincts develop only in the adult butterfly.

A young hector features in this vintage drawing of swallowtail and birdwing caterpillars: http://animal.memozee.com/view.php?tid=3&did=39848 /

Pupae are usually loosely attached to a plant stem where they look like dead leaves:

Photo By Vinayaraj - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123853709

Like our Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, the Crimson Rose is well enough recognized as inedible that at least one other species gets some protection from being mistaken for it. The Common Mormon, a less toxic Indian swallowtail species, is usually even gaudier but some females resemble the Crimson Rose.