Butterfly of the Week: Atrophaneura, Pachliopta, etc. Phlegon, or Papilio Annae

Not much has been published about this week's butterfly,  and most of what has been published about it has been about changing its scientific name. The most up-to-date name is Pachliopta phlegon. The earliest was Papilio annae. Atrophaneura phlegon came in between, and was used in books likely to be in your library today. 

Google has exactly one good clear photo of a living Pachliopta phlegon, taken by Juan Manuel Sanchez, and for whatever reason Google absolutely refuses to add it to this page. Sanchez couldn't be positive that it wasn't P. strandi, which used to be listed as a subspecies of phlegon but is now considered a separate species.

Though "not uncommon or known to be threatened" in the real world, it's uncommon in the literature because people have disagreed about its classification. How different from P. annae is it? Should it be listed as a species, subspecies, or variety? The debate seems to have swirled about museum specimens, like the oldie shown above, photographed by C. Felder in the mid-nineteenth century. People don't seem to be studying the living animals. 

 Papilio annae was not reclassified as an Atrophaneura. There is some serious confusion about where this butterfly fits into the taxonomic system. That is, of course, of great importance to those who hold as a religious belief that these butterfly species must have "evolved" from theoretical common ancestors. To those who are more interested in the scientific study of what living animals are made of and how they behave, the obsession with an evolutionary theory can seem silly.  

Pachliopta phlegon is found on several of the Philippine Islands. The butterflies live in and near forests where the caterpillars can eat vines in the genus Aristolochia. The butterflies fly for about two weeks. Some information about their behavior and life cycle is probably known, but it's hard for scientists to publish that information in the absence of a clear consensus about how different phlegon is from strandi. (Strandi seems to be considered the more interesting species. It doesn't merely fade to yellow as some other Atrophaneuras sometimes do. It has a distinct yellow pigment underneath the red, which allows the spots on some specimens of strandi to remain yellow without fading).

Phlegon (often pronounced like "FLEA-gun") was the name given to one of the four horses that pulled the sun's chariot in Greek mythology, the name of a first-century Christian saint about whom little else is known, and the name of a second-century Greek writer. None of these characters is remembered as particularly associated with funerals today. Possibly, because phlegon was named after the fashion for naming butterflies after characters from ancient literature had passed its peak, the naturalists were no longer thinking about funerals and chose phlegon just because it was a good old Greek name that hadn't been used for anything for a while.