Merry Christmas, Gentle Readers! This post was of course written earlier in December and posted in our usual weekly schedule. Same with next week's New Year's Day butterfly post.
Battus madyes, the Madyes Swallowtail, has scalloped hind wings that may or may not include an extra-long projection suggesting some effort to grow "swallowtail" appendages. It is in the Swallowtail family because the structure of its wings is like the structure of the wings of butterflies that always have those "tails." The upperside of the wings is black, sometimes iridescent blue or green, sometimes faded to greenish gray or brown, usually with some yellow or white markings. The underside can be black, yellow, brown, or gray and may have colored spots, depending on the subspecies. The top side of the body is black all over if female, black with yellow or white on the abdominal section if male. The underside of the body may have colored spots. There's a lot of individual variation that forms somewhat distinct regional variations, some of which are reliable enough to be classified as subspecies.
Photo by Andrew Neild.
A Google search for madyes brings up lots of web pages. Unfortunately most of them are about this butterfly in folk art or in taxidermy, and the more scientific ones tend to focus on identifying the differences among almost a dozen subspecies of this madly variable South American species. Beyond its many different looks, little seems to be known about this butterfly. And, although some nice pictures of living butterflies are available online, the ones that have been positively identified by subspecies are all badly faded museum specimens. Inaturalist is trying to sort the group's pretty pictures by subspecies, but has yet to do so. My Google search pulled up only one, not very clear, photo of a living butterfly that had been authoritatively identified as subspecies tucumanus.
The butterfly is not very big, with a wingspread usually between 2.5 and 3 inches. It is very popular. As documentation that the study of the world's butterflies is trending, there are multiple pages for pictures of Battus madyes at US Walmart-com. In South America, each subspecies is or could be a souvenir for a different tourist market.
But, since it is most often found at elevations between 3,300 and 6,700 feet, in the Andes, many tourists don't actually try to see or photograph the butterfly. If they bought T-shirts in aid of conservation sites, all would be well. Unfortunately, many are still willing to pay for dead bodies, which we should never do. If you need to study the chemicals found in butterflies' bodies, their lives are short enough that you can rear a few in captivity and have bodies that died of old age to study before the end of the school term. Buying dead bodies could encourage desperate people to wipe out a local population.
If you want to collect butterflies, do it the modern way, with digital photos.and videos. Butterflies' appeal is their tiny, alien lives, the wings that flutter so fast they blur, the hearts that beat so fast we can't see or feel them at all. Butterfly carcasses are a lot of nasty old dead bodies that attract tiresome flesh-eating beetles into the building. Why hold onto what is least pleasant about butterflies now that it's so easy to preserve what is loveliest about them?
Since the different wing markings of the subspecies are most of the scientific information available about this species, let's consider the subspecies, some of which are distinctive enough to have been listed as separate species in the past. I don't want to clutter your browsers with copies of the Butterflies of America reference specimens, which consist of very small pictures of faded dead butterflies that were then magnified to a degree of blurriness I find downright morbid. I think the only way to deal with this situation is to leave the subspecies list incomplete and update this post, in a year or two, when Inaturalist may have recognizable pictures of each subspecies. Wikipedia currently lists:
Adloni: Found in Ecuador, this subspecies is smaller and lighter-colored than others. The name probably comes from a family name, Adloni or Adlon.
Buechei: Found in Peru. Google doesn't even have an explanation of the name, though it's probably from the family name Buche or Bueche.
Callangaensis: Found in Peru. The family name Callanga is also found in Peru.
Chlorodamas: Found in Peru, sometimes ranked as the most appealing to artists and illustrators, this one has wide bands of white of yellow across the upper surface of the wings. Females are more likely to look white, males yellow. The first part of the name is Greek and means "green," but Google offers no explanation for the second part that makes sense as a description of the butterfly. Greek lexicons show dama, a deer, damaris, a heifer, damazo, to break or tame an animal or defeat an enemy tribe, and adamas, diamond, but adamas was not used for a diamond shape and the butterfly's markings don't really form one.
Frankenbachi: Found in Peru, recognized as a subspecies only since 2001. The name honors someone whose family name was Frankenbach but Google shows no information about this person.
Lojaensis: Found in Ecuador, probably near the city of Loja.
Madyes: Found in Bolivia. The older names given to Swallowtail butterflies commemorated heroes of ancient literature. According to Herodotus, Madyes or Madius was a barbarian king.
Magnimacula: Found in Peru.. The name means "big spot" in Latin.
Montebanus: Found in Peru. Monteban is a family name, although Google tries to define it as the trade name for an antibiotic, narasin, that is routinely dumped into chicken feed in hopes of preventing coccidiosis and/or breeding super-resistant strains of coccidia bacteria.
Philetas: Found in Ecuador. Philetas was the name of a Greek poet; a few fragments of poems thought to be his still survive.
Plinius: Found in Peru. Plinius or Pliny was the name of a Greek author.
Tucumanus: Found in Argentina, presumably in the province called Tucuman. The underwings are shades of brown with black veins.
Photo by Walter Liriel Gomez Umpierro.
Any studies of this butterfly's life cycle that may have been made are not available online yet. The caterpillar is said to live on vines in the genus (you may have guessed) Aristolochia. How many generations there are in a year, nobody seems to know. The species is not thought to be endangered.
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