A good search engine is impersonal and objective. It may differ from other search engines in the order in which links appear, but all search engines should yield similar numbers of results for any given search term. A good search engine might be programmed to recognize scientific names like Battus zetides as suggesting that someone wants to see science and nature sites above shopping or pop culture sites, but would exclude sites only when the searcher specified--say, if a search term happened to be in use as a brand for irrelevant products, "exclude walmart, costco, target". A good search engine may limit the number of links that display on one screen but does not refuse to display all 100,000 links, if there are that many, so that the searcher can decide which ones are relevant. (For these butterfly posts, for example, I don't want links to sites that traffic in butterfly carcasses, but I might include a link to a poem about a butterfly.) I'm not pleased with Google's search results for Battus zetides.
Photo by Zac Peterson, donated to Argentinat.
Google says it finds 1,430 results. On the first try it pulls up 107 links. On the second try, it pulls up 130 links. It refuses to go further. A majority of the 130 links are irrelevant and/or duplicates. They're not being meticulously sorted for quality, since they include uninformative lists, one of which seems to be a random list of words beginning with Z, and the resume of a job seeker who once participated in a study of this butterfly species. The results include several less than in-depth "encyclopedia" sites or which the most fact-rich may be Wikipedia. There's a general sense that zetides is considered endangered and protected on Hispaniola island (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), but, for an endangered species, there's remarkably little about either the animals or the protection campaign. The search includes links in Russian, Chinese, and Korean, none of which I can read, but not in Haitian French or Dominican Spanish, both of which I can read. It includes at least ten links to traffickers in dead bodies, although traffic in parts of dead bodies of endangered animals is certainly not helping the animal populations and is usually illegal.
The Yahoo search I did for a more popular butterfly took more than 24 hours and felt exhausting, but the Google search feels more draining in a different way. Insulting. "We can't let non-specialists read anything beyond the ninth grade level!" Maybe the major search engines need to be regulated as the public utilities they're trying to become. "Not only can you show any document that's not classified as a secret to any person who searches for it. You will."
So much for the search process. On to the butterfly.
Why is it called zetides? Most Swallowtails were named for characters in literature, so who was Zetides? Nobody was. In Greek mythology, in what may have been originally just a poetic metaphor, two sons of the wind god Boreas joined the Argonauts. They went to Salmidessus, where their sister, who had married the king of Thrace, was locked up in prison, and liberated her. Then at Clos, when Heracles went ashore to search for Hylas, they persuaded the other Argonauts to sail without him. Resenting this slight, Heracles met the Argo at Tenos and killed the two "Boreads," Zetes and Kalais. In the sense that sons of a wind god would be breezes, it makes sense. Sort of. Breezes urged them to leave Heracles and sail on, but then Heracles caught up with them, and where were those breezes now?
Anyway, what Spanish speakers call the Caribbean Swallowtail was originally called Papilio zetes, but about the same time this butterfly was described, Linnaeus published something about another Swallowtail to which he gave that name. The Caribbean Swallowtail needed a new name. Zetides was chosen to commemorate its having been named originally after Zetes. It means, of course, Sons of Zetes in Greek. Did the mythological Zetes have sons? The name Zetides has since been given to other animal genera and species, apparently because some people think it's just a good name. This also makes sense. Sort of.
What makes no sense is that the very incomplete Wikipedia article for this species positively encourages the trade in these butterflies' carcasses, "for high prices," rather than presenting information about the butterfly and conservation efforts made on its behalf as if it were a seriously protected species. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are poor nations whose governments have more urgent concerns than conserving insects, perhaps. But any lifeform whose home is on an island can become a tourist attraction--flamingos on Trinidad, large venomous reptiles on Komodo, feral horses on Chincoteague...Why not butterflies in the hill forests of scenic Caribbean islands?
The IUCN suggests that people in poor countries be paid to study butterflies, write about how rare and valuable they are, and then focus the attention of the carcass collectors on the larger specimens with unblemished wings they're likely to get from a commercial butterfly farm. That might help but, seriously, I think those of us who use the Internet need to direct attention a step further in the direction of conservation. Who on Earth would want to fill boxes with nasty decaying carcasses of living things when it is now relatively easy to preserve our memories of them in beautiful photos and videos!
A commercially farmed butterfly that was killed before it could fly, to ensure perfect wings, was still a living animal. Small, with very little brain and a short life expectancy, but nevertheless endowed by its Creator with enough senses and "feelings" to make up for all the rational thought of which it was never capable. It would not have minded being photographed but it probably did mind being killed at the beginning of the ten to forty days Nature allotted to it to flit, sip, and reproduce. We don't even know that it may not have had a beshert whose life's happiness depended on finding it. We do know that photographing butterflies has no particular effect on their lives.
People in Haiti and the Dominican Republic do seem to be thinking about conserving the butterflies and other pollinators. Their thought seems to lack the focus, however, characteristic of people who succeed in monetizing an asset.
https://www.caribaea.org/es/en-haiti-los-insectos-polinizadores-encuentran-refugio-en-los-espacios-verdes-urbanos-de-port-au-prince/ (Right, that one is in Spanish.)
There's not (yet) a great deal of information about Battus zetides Out There. Notably, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in 1994, reportedly came to some sort of conclusion about our federal policy on what FWS persisted in calling "a foreign butterfly." If it's Puerto Rican, it may be unfamiliar in the States, but it's not foreign. The perception that Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are still "foreign" places may have had something to do with the species being recognized as threatened, but not protected.
It is primarily a pollinator species.. Butterfly counts attracted more of this species, and others that share its habitat, to bananas or flowers than to rotten fruit or carrion.
Butterflies' micro-brains don't usually have room for much loyalty to other butterflies, or anything like a group action. There are exceptions to this rule. If predators, or researchers, seem to be attacking one butterfly in a group, Antiopas sometimes charge the attacker as a group, which may startle the attacker or confuse it enough that it releases the butterfly it caught. Swallowtails are not normally that brave, but when males of some species cluster at a puddle to sip water, they all fly up and flap around in a confusing swirl of wings. Tiger Swallowtails are a well-known example of this behavior in the Eastern States. Battus zetides seems to lack this protective social instinct. When a drinking buddy was caught in a net, the others went on drinking..
Males and females usually look alike, with yellow spots on the upper side and multicolored spots on the underside of the wings. Some females, however, have white spots instead of yellow on the upper surface.
Though big and showy and said to be "quite common, perhaps the msot common species" in the specific neighborhoods where they live, these butterflies remain remarkably little known. Google found a total of two photos of living zetides, both obviously different views of one animal on one day. While its food plants are thought to be two species of Aristolochiai, it's not clear whether that's because people have watched caterpillars mature, or because they've watched butterflies laying eggs.. The field is wide open for islanders who want to learn what the earlier forms of this butterfly look like and how they behave.
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