Have any of you, Gentle Readers, ever struggled to define your identity? As the son or daughter of someone who was well known for doing something that wasn't what you wanted to do...as a citizen of a country that sometimes seems to be best known for either the place many of its citizens left, or the bigger nation of which most of them don't want to be a part...as a spouse who's happily married to someone whose success does not require a working partner, who wants a job and a life of your own...you might find this week's butterfly easy to relate to. Last week we saw how hard it is to identify Graphium euphrates while it's alive. This week we consider Graphium euphratoides, a butterfly known only for looking like Graphium euphrates but not actually being it.
Photo from the Auckland Museum in New Zealand. Some of these poor faded bodies were Graphium euphratoides. No digital photos of living butterflies of this species seem to be online.
How does the butterfly cope? By not knowing or caring what humans think of it, obviously. It just gets on with pollinating flowers and looking for mates, probably more than one if it lives long enough to find them.
Not that humans have ever said, written, or thought much about this butterfly. It's rare, not because it's endangered but because it lives only on Mindanao island. It has no economic value. Hello, the Philippines are a busy place, trying to be a modern nation and a traditional tropical paradise at the same time while maintaining the quiet, cheerful, likable mood cultural norms demand. They'll have time to study a butterfly that looks just like another butterfly, only it's different, in some other century, maybe, if all goes well. Their academic types are occupied with topics like which island specialties have economic value, or ought to have, and which traditional island languages people want to preserve, and how, and how many people can earn money on writing sites when many of them speak good English, after their fashion, but can't claim it's native US or UK or Australian English...They have given Graphium euphratoides a name of its own, the Mindanao Swallowtail, and now they are getting on with their business.
Some lists of Swallowtail species, including the IUCN Red List, don't mention euphratoides at all. Many entomologists regard it as a subspecies of Graphium antiphates, G. decolor, or G. euphrates. Others barely pause to mention it before rushing on to more interesting species, like this PDF, which does have a nice photo of museum specimens of euphratoides and euphrates right beside each other so you can find the subtle differences. Those subtle differences will be very unlikely to show on a living, flapping butterfly.
European scientists like Eliette Reboud give euphratoides hardly a mention while mapping the genomes of the magnificent Birdwings and Batwings and the charismatic Zebra Swallowtails.
(Wiley, by the way, is looking for academic-type papers on climate change and what people are doing about it. If anyone Out There has a relevant degree and wants to publish part of a thesis about climate strategies that are based in observed reality not theory, and involve actions other than setting up a global dictatorship, I'd love to help write it.)
Nobody really knows anything about the life cycle of euphratoides. It's thought to eat some plant in the Annonaceae family. Eggs are probably round and pale, caterpillars leaf-green and humpbacked, and chrysalides pale green or brown and shaped like dry leaves, but nobody knows this for sure.
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