This is an obscure butterfly. It may or may not have strayed into Florida, probably as a stowaway on a boat, at times in the past. Reports of its having been found in Florida are questionable; it's one of the dark American swallowtails that are easily mistaken for each other. It is sometims found in the Bahamas but its native home is, shudder, quake, CUBA. Google is very, very suspicious of anything relating to Cuba, probably for valid reasons. Google was not very cooperative with a search for information about a butterfly who knows nothing, and cares less, about humans' notions of international relations. As far as Battus devilliersii is concerned, Cuba is just home, right? Home is where the flowers and the potential mates are. Life is too short to bother about much else.
This web site can relate. We like butterflies because they are appealing little animals who have nothing to do with humans' messed-up relations with other humans.
Anyway there are not and probably have never been a great number of Battus devilliersii in this world. They appear on checklists of species butterfly watchers might see on a Caribbean cruise, but nobody seems to be photographing them in the Bahamas. Photos online are of museum specimens.
Devilliersii has no red spots. Today we celebrate the simple sophistication of black and silver. Actually the living butterfly is iridescent, with a wingspan about three and a half inches--eye-catching, but easily mistaken for other species, like our familiar but fascinating Battus philenor, whose variant forms and subspecies Americans love to document. In a clear light devilliersi's underside is distinctive:
The first description of it was written in French:
"We know this species only by one male specimen..." In other words, he was guessing that it was a species, though subsequent generations of entomologists have not disputed that it is. They don't even seem to have argued at length about whether to call it Papilio devilliersi or Battus devilliersi. The first naturalist to describe a species accurately gets to name it and Monsieur Godart, who described this species, chose to name it after someone called De Villiers whom his article does not identify.
Funet.fi also has a more thorough discussion, still limited to how the adults' wing markings differ from B. philenor above and B. polydamas below, in English. Still, nothing is reported about when or how long these butterflies fly, or what their early lives are like. Some Cuban documents that mention B. devilliersi are available online in Spanish. They mention the butterfly in lists but don't discuss its life, except to the extent of mentioning at which nature parks in Cuba it was found in different years. They do not tell travellers where or when they might encounter devilliersi in the Bahamas.
The only fact Google reports about the life cycle of this butterfly is that caterpillars eat Aristolochia elegans.
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