Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Adamastor

Graphium adamastor has an English name: "Boisduval's White Lady." It's not white, and obviously only about half of its population can be female. Another species in the same sub-genus, whose wings really are white with black or brown borders, is the White Lady, but that's not much of an excuse for extending that name to a mostly black butterfly. If I were this butterfly I'd prefer to be called Graphium adamastor. 

Photo by Raiwen, taken in Guinea.

Adamastor was a character in European literature of the Renaissance. Harking back to Greek literature, he was called an "untamed Titan." He was also explained as a personification of the Cape of Good Hope. In the first story about him, a poem by Luis da Camoes, he was not unsympathetic to Portuguese sailors; after telling them how he was banished from Greece to the far end of Africa, he stepped aside and let them sail on to India in peace. In what may have been the second, allegedly told by an African, Adamastor was less sympathetic to slave traders and sank a slave ship. Damastos was a Greek word for a tame animal, and a-damastos meant a wild one.

So naturally early naturalists gave this name to African wildlife species, including a dinosaur fossil, and including a white-spotted, mostly black or dark brown, tailless butterfly in the Swallowtail family. The name was also given to a warship, later.. 

Alternative scientific names have been proposed for this species. Those who observe that the genus Graphium is crowded and could be split up have proposed calling the genus Arisbe. (Arisbe is the name of a few minor characters in ancient Greek literature.) An early naturalist proposed calling the species carchedonius (Carchedonius appeared in ancient Roman literature). 

The butterfly is reported from several places in Africa, some widely scattered: "Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria; also a subspecies in Central African Republic and northern Zaire, according to the IUCN."The species is not considered in danger of extinction.

Photo from Lepidigi.net.

Each source that mentioned subspecies listed different names and numbers, and none explained what distinguishes the subspecies. Names like dimbokro, guineaensis, and zongo obviously refer to places where the animals were found. 

They live in and on the edges of "dry" forests. Population sizes vary from year to year. They fly slowly but strongly, and sometimes flit above the treetops. They are a pollinator species.

When laying eggs, the mother butterfly looks for curled-up shoots of new leaves and tucks her eggs inside, where leaves will cover them. Eggs are laid on leaves in the genus Annonaceae. 

For the number of citations search engines pull up for this species, relatively little of substance has been written about it. Photos, if available, are usually of dead butterflies in museums. About half of all citations consist of species checklists. Like many Swallowtails this species is at least somewhat sexually dimorphic, but no source pagge had photographs of a living male and a living female. Photos of eggs, larvae, pupae, and host plants were not available, The field appeqrs to be wide open for young people in any of several historically disadvantaged countries to become famous as the first to rea this butterfly and documenti its life cycle.