A Google search for Atrophaneura, or Papilio, or Losaria palu will turn up lots of links. The butterfly is named after the city of Palu on Sulawesi island, but, exotic diseases often being called by the names of places where someone first noticed them, palu also happens to be a common word in French and some other languages for diseases like malaria or dengue. In Malay palu means a hammer, hammering, a blow, and sometimes metaphorically a loss. Most English sources call this butterfly the Palu Swallowtail; some use the more auspicious-sounding name "Sulawesi Clubtail."
Losaria palu is on Wikipedia's list of the most data-deficient arthropods. Much remains to be learned about this butterfly. It looks like an overgrown Losaria coon. The tail segments of the body are yellow rather than red; the wings, especially the forewings, are colored like coon's but are longer and narrower. Each individual forewing is almost three inches long, making the full wingspan about six inches. Only in 1912 did a naturalist argue that its different shape was consistent enough to justify considering it as a distinct species. Recent DNA studies suggest that it does indeed have enough distinctive DNA to be considered as a species, and the gene that elongates its wings is a gene it shares with the even bigger Birdwings. If there ever had been an evolutionary chain between Batwings and Birdwings, palu would be the first link on the Batwing side of that chain.
It is thought to be "confined to the west coast and mountains of Sulawesi," but scientists aren't absolutely sure of this, relatively few scientists having explored the whole island. Much of Sulawesi is still tropical rainforest, which makes gorgeous photos but is not easy for humans to explore. .
Losaria palu is sometimes regarded as a subspecies of L. coon; this very technical scientific paper shows typical specimens of each type of Clubtail, and describes some of the methods used to distinguish different species today.
This one explains palu's claim to be considered a distinct species:
The authors say palu's DNA is more like the giant Birdwings' than the other Batwings' DNA is. This e-book, which places photos of different museum specimens side by side for comparison, shows the effects of the genes under consideration.
Losaria palu has been the subject of a book, but the publisher warns that the book has been compiled from what's available online, which means it must contain much more general commentary about swallowtails than specific information about Losaria palu:
Many of the world's swallowtail butterflies are fantastically iridescent while living and fade to drab once dead.
Though little is really known about how many of these butterflies exist, or ever have existed, there aren't many of them and the species is often considered to be in danger. Ironically, this view is directly responsible, at the moment, for making it difficult to find information about the species online. A Polish site called Glosbe, with the laudable intention of creating an international dictionary with a whole page displaying the use of every word, has created pages that merely translate words for "swallowtail butterfly" between languages, and as examples of the usage of words for swallowtails these pages cite lists that include Losaria palu. And unfortunately this dictionary project is funded by extremely annoying advertisements, including some with moving images, which clog browsers and make it hard to note the words and move on to more informative pages. Something really ought to be done about Glosbe. While the translation information is valuable, it ought to be easy for Google simply to block any moving or blinking ad graphics and, ideally, any images that appear to be "of people."
(Why block "images of people"? Zazzle offers that option, and I think more web sites should adopt it. When you use a picture of a person in an advertisement, you insert a visual "story" that distracts attention from what you are legitimately offering for sale. Images of body parts, especially in disease conditions, are disturbing and distracting enough that no advertiser should ever consider them. If selling patent remedies, they should display pictures of pills or bottles. But images of attractive professional models are distracting, and for some prospective buyers disturbing, too. Why keep people from noticing your shirt design, or whatever, by triggering a mental process like "That's not Tracy, but it looks like Tracy. Oh, that Tracy! Why did I ever think Tracy was even attractive? Well person was attractive, but person also..." Your advertising product does not need that. Better to keep the focus on the shirt itself by hanging it on a rod/)
The more cautious IUCN has, since 1985, maintained a list that describes seven swallowtail species, including Florida's Schaus Swallowtail, Jamaica's Homerus Swallowtail, and Europe's Corsican Swallowtail, as endangered. Another 24 tropical swallowtails and birdwings are "vulnerable," 20 are simply "rare," 13 are "indeterminate," and 14 species, including palu, are "Insufficiently Known."
What, for example, does Losaria palu eat? Most of the Batwings eat tropical vines in the genera Aristolochia or, less often, Thottea. Such vines are found on Sulawesi. Do the butterflies also eat pepper plants, as some suggest? How often? Nobody officially knows. All the Batwings go through a stage when they are large unattractive caterpillars. They don't sting, but benefit from having bristles that look as if they might sting (and certainly make them hard for birds to swallow). It can be hard to tell whether a large caterpillar you see crawling on a garden plant is merely wandering, doing no harm, or is about to strip every leaf off the plant. Gardeners tend to assume the worst, since it's too late to save the plant if they don't. But even the few swallowtail caterpillars that do eat garden plants (North America's Black Swallowtails will eat anise, carrot, and parsley plants, and are sometimes known as parsley caterpillars) can be controlled by picking them off the garden plants and redirecting their attention to the native non-crop plants they normally eat. Losaria palu is not a garden pest species. Whether it can get any nourishment from nibbling on pepper plants would be an interesting scientific data point but, so far, science does not have an answer to the question.
Some residents of the island claim that the butterflies live in a drier, sunnier area, with fewer vines, than the deep rain forest. If accurate, this would suggest that at least some of them have adapted to eat wild pepper plants.
Despite large areas of rainforest seldom seen by human eyes, Sulawesi seems to some observers to be "overpopulated," with too much of the rainforest being cut down to make room for more humans who want to dry out the air and relyon grass to hold down the soil. Suggestions that the humans could protect several rare and/or endangered species of wildlife on the island--Losaria palu is one of many--trigger reactions from males who seem to identify with the mindless sperm cells nature overproduces in such abundance. "Some people don't liiiike people. Or they don't like the islanders. Racists, that's it, they're racists. They hate Asian people." Actually those with most interest in maintaining a sustainable human population on the island are Asian, themselves, and may even be islanders. Anglo-Americans who advocate more efficient natural methods of birth control are inevitably more concerned about the overpopulation of our Eastern States, though, when we think about it, we think it's a pity and a shame if rare, valuable trees are being displaced by useless grass anywhere on Earth.
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