Monday, December 2, 2024

Butterfly of the Week: Gauthier's Striped Swordtail

Gauthier's Striped Swordtail is also known as Graphium biokoensis, the Graphium of Bioko island, although it's also found on the mainland of Africa. It's not extinct but, because it looks just like a few other species in flight, so far nobody is posting shareable photos of this species in flight.


Photo by Africaone. Some sources mention that the underside of biokoensis can lack red spots but its main difference from policenes is having longer "tails." 

How far inland this species is found has been a matter of debate, depending on how closely scientists think it's related to similar-looking species. It has been treated as a subspecies of two other Graphiums. Sources who classify it as a distinct species may also distinguish it from the Long-Tailed Striped Swordtail, G. liponesco, although some sources treat the English names as synonyms. Here is a source that treats biokoensis and liponesco as two distinct species that look just alike:


Assuming good faith on the part of the author, there was probably some scientific basis for saying that two species that look alike "can never co-occur" or are never found in the same place; it would be nice to know what that basis is. 

The author of this PDF treats biokoensis and liponesco as subspecies of Graphium policenes and says both are widespread, but rare. 


Earlier this year, Bollino and Bouyer published a widely circulated paper (well, widely circulated among people who read about butterflies) arguing that biokoensis should be regarded as a subspecies of policenes.


This Korean site has an overview of the Swordtails and Ladies in the genus Graphium, subgenus Arisbe, showing the just noticeable differences between a typical biokoensis, policenes, and scopoli.


Graphium biokoensis lives in tropical rain forests where it's hard for humans to observe. Parts of Bioko were still described as unexplored, or incompletely explored, in 2014. In sober scientific terms Ignacio Martin and Pablo Cobos describe their explorations of the Caldera de Luba, the extinct volcano's crater on the island, in 2005 to 2007. They argued that biokoensis was not a subspecies of Graphium scopoli and anticipated the more recent paper in saying that it was a subspecies of policenes. They really should have written more, and included more pictures, than they did here. No doubt they were saving their best material for a book.


Males are known to come out of the forests and join other male butterflies in groups at puddles. Nobody is positive about the females or about the early life stages of this species, if species it be. 

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