This week's butterfly is large, rare, threatened, and confusing. Graphium idaeoides, sometimes called the Giant Graphium, looks almost exactly like Idea leuconoe, the Giant White butterfly, and resembles other species in the genus Idea enough to confuse even humans looking at still images. The Giant White is much more toxic to animals that eat it than Graphium idaeoides is. These "giants" have wingspans of 4 to 5 inches--or more.
Museum specimen from March for Agusan Marsh, a conservation project from 2015.
Photos of this butterfly alive are rare on the Internet. Stijn de Win snapped some that are recognizable, though at odd angles, but then requested that nobody copy or link to them.
How do humans tell these species apart? This page, with museum specimens of Graphium idaeoides above and Idea leuconoe below, shows some differences. The most reliable difference is probably that Graphium idaeoides has scalloped edges on its wings, with whte along the outermost edge, and Idea leuconoe has plain round edges with black around the outermost edge. The markings can be almost identical. Individuals of both species can look creamy white or yellow rather than flat white, especially in the inside corners of the wings.
In order to be listed as "threatened" a species must have had a good deal written about it. Much of that information is, or should be, available to the public online. Greedheads at Google, however, won't show it, because they've made commitments (1) to show us only about one-tenth of what's available and (2) to prioritize paying commercial sites above academic, social, specialists', or individuals' sites. Most people searching for a living creature by its scientific name may want to know on what grounds it was ruled a threatened species (if it was), but Google has degenerated into a site that tries to distract you from that question with more and more "information" about sites that sell images or carcasses, rather than information about what Graphium idaeoides eats (as distinct from general blather about its being a "rain forest species").
Schools and teachers need to be aware of this, and require students to use only printed documents for research until such time as (1) Google searches are 100% clean of robotic plagiarism, (2) Google searches aren't cut off at any arbitrary point but will crawl on through 100,000 links if there are 100,000 links, and (3) Google searches consistently prioritize all academic information above any "shopping" information.
There is nothing wrong with painting pictures of butterflies, or putting pictures of butterflies on postage stamps, or reconstructing pictures of butterflies with toy blocks. Graphium idaeoides has been commemorated on a coin, on a Lego block, and in many drawings and paintings. There is something wrong with shoving these commercial images at people who are looking for scientific information about the real world.
Pardon me, Gentle Readers. I become grumpy when I have to go to Yahoo for information.
Anyway, Graphium idaeoides (or ideaoides, but idaeoides is the standard spelling) is most likely to be found on the eastern sides only of certain Philippine islands: Luzon, Samar, Leyte, and all around the south side of Mindanao. It is almost always seen in March.
Professor Jumalon wrote more than this about the Swallowtail species of the Philippines, and his children and grandchildren have chosen to honor his memory by maintaining a Butterfly Sanctuary in Basak:
Apparently they have not been able to determine what Graphium idaeoides eats.
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