This web site has registered a certain impatience on the part of our mostly American readers to discuss more American butterflies. Patience, please! There were a lot of Atrophaneura species before they were reassigned to different genera. This week we consider a rare one, Pachliopta liris. Liris refers to a lyre, going back to that old "funeral" theme; lyres were played at funerals. Today the translation of liris in some languages is "lyrical, like a song." Since Pachliopta are sometimes called Rose Swallowtails, does that make P. liris the Lyric Rose?
It was recognized as a distinctive species of Red-Bodied Swallowtail quite early. In flight (INaturalist.org has a lot of photos of this butterfly in flight, which they're not sharing) the black-veined white patches on the fore and hind wings merge into what looks like a shimmering chevron of white, very conspicuous and distinctive even when the black areas of the wings and body fade to gray or brown. The red spots, and red areas on the body, seem often to fade to yellow even while the butterfly is still alive.
If that one were flying, it would look wider and shorter than the average swallowtail butterfly, with its base color beng dark brown and its conspicuous marking being a V of shimmering gold.
Well, you know what it means when this web site uses photos of dead museum pieces instead of living butterflies. It does not mean living butterflies don't exist, but that so far they've been very scantly documented in live photos. "Eco-tourists" have contributions to make to science. The few web sites that have live photos of Pachliopta liris are still using blurry ones for lack of good clear ones.
The species doesn't have an English name because it's not been much talked about in English. It's always been a rare butterfly, found on only a few islands in Indonesia, where English was not the preferred language for a long time. The butterfly was talked about mostly by scientists, who used its Latin names, originally Papilio liris, then Atrophaneura liris and now Pachliopta liris. They noted that liris is found on six islands, and has evolved into seven distinct subspecies, with the subspecies liris and aberrans both being found on Timor.
Though there are not and have never been very many liris, they are reported to be locally common in the places where they live, and don't seem to be especially endangered.
It's a large butterfly by our standards, though not by South Asian standards: wingspan about four and a half inches, females a little larger and darker than males. At https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/982373-Pachliopta-liris/browse_photos black and gray individuals outnumber brown ones, but yellow spots outnumber red. That site has a large unsorted collection of pictures of living liris, with no attempt to sort by gender or subspecies. Most sites show only museum pieces...
Living butterflies often look the way other Red-Bodied Swallowtails look as faded museum pieces, so what do the museum pieces fade to?
Sad.
Eggs, larvae, and pupae have been observed by scientists who found them boringly similar to other Pachliopta species. The butterflies live on vines in the genus Aristolochia. The eggs are little round beads coated with droplets of aristolochic acid, which give the eggs a textured look and discourage ants from eating them.
Caterpillars are described as dark brown, red, purple, with a bumpy bristly surface that seems designed to be unappetizing to birds. Like other swallowtails, the caterpillar has an osmeterium, but one scientist wrote that the Pachliopta generally have smaller osmeteria and are less willing to show them than some of the other swallowtails.
Pupae have a somewhat flattened look and seem to be trying to look like dead leaves.
One reason for the scant documentation of this species is a feeling that as a distinctly Indonesian lifeform it ought to be studied and documented by Indonesian authors. This will probably happen, and a web search for Pachliopta liris will probably yield very different results in ten years than it does now.
No comments:
Post a Comment