Graphium evemon follows Graphium eurypylus on alphabetical lists, and also--this is rare!--in a logical progression. These two species look alike. They look like some other species, too. They resemble each other enough that people who call G. eurypylus the Great Jay call G. evemon the Lesser Jay (or Blue Jay). And the names are even linked in ancient literature; Evemon was the father of one of the characters called Eurypylus.
Photo by Dhiviyaah, illustrating how vivid the iridescent wing scales can look at the right angle to a bright light. Their color is an effect of light. Even this colorful fellow probably fades to black and white in some lights, and sometimes the blue-to-white patches can even iridesce pale pink--as in other photos taken by Dhiviyaah at the same puddle (Selangor, Malaysia, in April).
Greater and lesser? Some subspecies of eurypylus are much bigger than evemon; some are about the same size, with a wingspan between two and three inches. Males are more likely to look blue-black and pale blue, females to look blackish-brown and white or cream-yellow. Females are not consistently so much larger than males as to make size a reliable guide to sex. The most reliable indicator of these butterflies' gender is that only the females lay eggs.
It is found in Malaysia and nearby countries. It tolerates human company and is said to be common in Singapore. The question of how much more human overpopulation this butterfly might be able to survive, however, vexes butterfly enthusiasts in Singapore:
It is an active, fast-moving species, most often photographed at puddles and on stream banks where it achieves a relatively restful state while sipping water.
Photo by Hix, Brunei, April. This species is often found in mixed flocks including other Graphiums and other types of butterflies. The butterflies who hang out all day at a puddle usually of brackish or polluted water, slurping up those mineral salts as part of nature's filtration system, are all males of different species. The groups are often joined by a few females, who typically stay on the edges, don't drink much, but look for potential mates. In some butterfly species the females are ready to lay eggs upon eclosion while the males have to spend a few days absorbing mineral salts before they can mate; this gives females the options of mating with older males who have mated before and are less fertile, or waiting for males their own age to mature. Women can so relate.
Its genome has been mapped:
All butterflies need some water but young male Graphium evemon are somewhat conspicuous for the amount they take in, and excrete, at a time. They need to takein a certain amount of mineral salts after eclosion before they can mate. Their bodies extract these mineral salts from large quantities of brackish and/or polluted water. The butterflies can be observed sucking up water, squirting out tiny streams of used water from the back ends, and drinking more without leaving the puddle. They don't mind sharing a puddle with any number of drinking buddies, of their own species or several others, but other butterflies soon learn to avoid their back ends. (Most of their drinking buddies seem to be the same size, or smaller than they are. Can butterflies think "How clever of me to be able to squirt pressurized liquids past my smaller neighbor's face," and "How nasty of him to be able to squirt pressurized liquids past my face," or is that kind of thinking peculiar to humans?)
Here is a video of Graphium evemon and some other butterflies in their natural environment, flitting and sipping.
This blog notes that in Singapore evemon is easily confused with doson or sarpedon, and in Malaysia all three can be confused with four more species. Evemon's most recognizable feature is the black bar along the front edge of each fore wing, which forms a continuous angled line with the bar along the inside edge of each hind wing when the underside of the wings is showing.
They are pollinators; they sip flower nectar. When considered as a tongue, the proboscis of Graphium butterflies is long, but it's shorter than some other butterflies' probosces. These rather large butterflies feed on rather small flowers.
Photo by CatalinaTong, showing that, although it's considered tailless, this Graphium sometimes shows what looks like an attempt to grow tails. But it never really can be said to have tails on its hind wings. Photo taken in September, in Singapore.
Photo by Buffypon. In common with some other Graphiums, evemon seem attracted to objects that show a bright blue-green or green-blue color. In addition to the one below (Indonesia, July) photo galleries like Inaturalist show these butterflies flitting around green garden hose, blue-green scrubbing pads, even scraps of green-blue plastic waste.
Or moving human feet, Photo by Sohkamyung, who snapped several photos of this butterfly fluttering around the shoes of a person walking. Singapore, March. For a Singaporean butterfly watcher it's startling to hear Americans use "jay" and "albatross" to refer to birds rather than butterflies (https://butterflymuse.blogspot.com/2013/08/it-bird-no-it-butterfly.html). This photo reminds me of another usage of "jay" that was more common in the nineteenth century, to mean a country fellow who didn't know his way around the city. Walking out into traffic was "jaywalking." It got some "country jays," as this kind of behavior probably gets some butterflies, crushed flat on roads.
Subspecies are identified as albociliatus, evemon, eventus, hetaerias, igneolus, and orithia.
Albociliatus means "white-haired":
Photo of albociliatus by Zdenek Hanc, showing the white hairs all along the area where wings join body, as well as in the male's scent folds.
Names like albociliatus are sometimes found as albociliatum, albociliatis, albociliata, etc., because in Latin the ending of a noun or adjective tells where it fits into a sentence. In the US the scientific names are "correctly" used without changing the endings, but sometimes people do. Cotton, however, objected to albociliatis:
Cotton's comment on how to tell this subspecies from Graphium eurypylus or G. doson:
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I should also mention that there is a 3rd very similar species in Laos, which is absent from Thailand, Graphium evemon albociliatus (Fruhstorfer, 1901). This is very similar to G. eurypylus in that the mark at the base of the hindwing underside is joined in a Y with a red bar near the costa (unlike G. evemon from Sundaland, which lacks the red mark). G. eurypylus and G. evemon can be distinguished by checking the lowest submarginal spot on the forewing upperside (cell CuA2). In G. eurypylus it is paired, whereas in both G. evemon and doson there is only a single spot (or sometimes a very small second spot) - this only applies to the upperside. Note also that the underside of G. eurypylus often has a pinkish sheen when fresh, not present in the other two species.
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Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology currently insists that this subspecies should be called Graphium albociliatus, a distinct species, based on the work of Page and Treadaway (2014).
Of Graphium evemon evemon, the original or "nominate" subspecies, Boisduval wrote that it was what many collectors actually had and thought was G. eurypylus.
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55 — Papilio Evemon, Boisd.
Un tiers plus petit qu' Eurypilus , auquel il ressemble beaucoup. La bande commune verte proportionnellement un peu plus large sur le bord interne des premières ailes ; trois des traits linéaires de la cellule discoïdale remplacés par des lâches de la même couleur ; bord extérieur du repli abdominal des secondes ades garni de poils bruns. Dessous des ailes Inférieures constamment dépourvu de lunule rouge sur le bord d'en haut , les taches marginales de ces mêmes ailes notablement plus grandes en dessous qu'en dessus , et presque cunéiformes. Le reste comme dans Eurypilus.
Java, Sumatra. — C'est cette espèce que plusieurs collections possèdent sous le nom d'Eurjpilus.
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Rothschild didn't even mention size as a critical distinction between eurypylus and evemon, possibly because he was thinking of one of the smaller subspecies of eurypylus:
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Distinguished from P. etirypyhis axion Feld., of which it has been often considered to be a mere aberration, by the black costal streak on the underside of the hindwings within the white median band being always united at the subcostal nervure to the black band which runs along the abdominal margin, and being devoid of the costal red spot; further, by the scent-organ within the abdominal fold of the male being reduced to a small streak, which is only visible when the fold is wholly opened out. On the upperside of the forewings the spot near the apex of the cell in front of the lower discoidal nervule is very seldom present : out of over eighty specimens I find it in one specimen only, and there it is minute.
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Eventus is the Latin word that became "event"; it was used to mean "outcome," "results," "fortune," and Bonus Eventus, "good results," was sometimes worshipped as a god. The images and cult of Bonus Eventus seem to have been adopted from a Greek cult of Agathodaimon, "good kind spirit." He was a latecomer to the Roman pantheon, not mentioned in their "classic" literature.
Photo of eventus by Eunicekong95, Malaysia, July.
Hetaerias meant "others" in Greek. This subspecies apparently looked like "the others" because they have larger dark and smaller light spots on their wings.
Igneolus means "little fire" in Latin. Some sources, like IndiaBiodiversity, lump igneolus, albociliatus, and the recently proposed subspecies lebar, back into eventus.
Photo from IndiaBiodiversity.org, where it is identified as igneolus, albociliatus, lebar, or eventus, which the site maintains are synonyms.
Orthia or orithia or orithya meant "standing" in Greek (from orthos, "straight") and was the name of a temple and school dedicated to Artemis at Sparta. Scholars think Orthia, a winged animal figure, started out as a different goddess than Artemis, who was portrayed as a young woman, but their cults and lore merged. A ruder explanation of Orthia had to do with the school's reputation for discipline through whipping, such that the students might have preferred standing to sitting...
Photo by Jamiun, showing Graphium evemon orthia on the right and G. bathycles bathycloides on the left.
Photo of orthia by Danita Delimont. Like a Zazzle design, it can be printed onto puzzles, mugs, and other objects you can order from
Photo of orthia by Darrell Gulin, probably available as wall art:
The life cycle of this species is not well documented online; most digital records are photos of males lekking at puddles. Most of the photos below come from Horace Tan's Blogspot blog, ButterflyCircle.blogspot.com.
Naturalists imagine that Graphium evemon may be symbiotic with more than one species of plant in the Annonaceae family. It is known to feed on Artabotrys wrayi in Singapore.
Eggs are laid on new shoots of leaves, timed so that the caterpillars generally emerge just as the leaves do. Eggs may be laid on either the upper side or the under side of a leaf, and caterpillars may eat from either side.
Hatchlings are black and show a "belt" of lighter color around the humped back. Bristles are stiff hairs that may make the caterpillar harder to swallow, not spines loaded with venom; in later stages the bristling spines reduce to little warts, but the tail end remains forked.
Photo by Big-simonchan. The caterpillar looks like other Graphium caterpillars, using the "sick bird's dropping" and "just part of the leaf" types of camouflage.
On molting the caterpillars eat their own shed skins. Some Swallowtail caterpillars' instinct to eat their own empty skins is offset by an instinct not to bite another skin of their own species that is still occupied, so they have the survival advantage of being able to huddle in groups of siblings where each individual is relatively less likely to be eaten by a predator who finds the groups. Some don't have this instinct not to eat their siblings, and in some species a bigger caterpillar may actively chase down a smaller sibling or cousin. All we know about evemon is that so far all caterpillars found have been solitary.
Caterpillars are brown through most of their active lives. The last caterpillar skin of the individuals studied was green, and the pupa was green, attached to a green leaf where it looked like a dying leaf. This tropical species usually pupates for nine days, but sometimes remains in the pupal stage for about six months, apparently designed to survive winter if it happened to be in a place that had a winter.
More photos of young butterflies at https://butterflycircle.blogspot.com/2014/05/life-history-of-blue-jay.html ,
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