In a small, tangential way this week's butterfly is part of a political controversy. Graphium kosii has been usually, but not always, accepted as a distinct species from Graphium weiskei since 2006. (It had been described by Mueller in 1999.) Both species live on the islands known as New Guinea. G. kosii lives only on the island called New Ireland. G. weiskei is a little more widely distributed. They look very similar to each other, and to G. stresemanni. If kosii is a species, though, it's a rare and probably threatened species whose existence would justify turning its whole native island into a nature preserve.
This museum specimen, ganked from Wikipedia, is the only clear photo of Graphium kosii I found.
Personally, I'm not opposed to nature preserves on one condition, but where that condition has been offered it has generally been violated. Nature preserves must not be owned by governments; when that happens, what's to stop somebody like Sarah Palin from strip-mining them. They should be owned by families who agree to live sustainably on the land and tolerate a certain amount of tourism.
But shouldn't governments "own" places like the Appalachian Trail in order to protect endangered species from extinction, someone will say. What has person read about the number of endangered species, or subspecies, known to have gone extinct along the Appalachian Trail, lately?
Right. This post is about butterflies in New Guinea. Anyway, the unsuspecting butterflies we're studying this week have been pressed into the service of an unholy, antichristian religious cult. The cult calls itself Globalism. It preaches, irrationally but with religious fervor, that a tyrannical global government--with the power to enforce things like vaccine mandates, medically assisted suicide, population increase or decrease quotas, mass migrations, military conscription, etc., worldwide--is necessary to prevent war or global warming, whichever the population most fear. It refuses, with religious zeal, to consider that a tyrannical global government would have no such effect. It treats land grabs as a religious ritual.
New Guinea didn't need Graphium kosii to have extremely attractive land. It's the home of several unique island plants and animals. Its rich green mountains are what are called a tropical paradise. Its indigenous population have been isolated and illiterate, subjecting themselves to the irrational taboos and superstitions people tend to believe when they have no other idea how to reduce the danger they face every day, for hundreds or thousands of years; nobody knows how long. They have not had the means to exploit the land in the way greedy Asians and Europeans would like to do; nor have they reached a level of cultural enlightenment at which they appreciate the land for its own sake. The land and the creatures who live on it are indeed in danger.
Through this situation flit rather pretty butterflies, small by comparison to New Guinea's Birdwing butterflies and Atlas moths, only about the size of what North Americans call our large butterflies: Graphium kosii kosii, Graphium weiskei weiskei, Graphium kosii gigantor...
Cleveland Amory, a wonderful old curmudgeon I used to want to work for, bequeathed control of his World Wildlife Fund to Globalists. The beautiful e-book linked below is an evangelical tract published by a Globalist cult--but if you read these butterfly articles, you'll want to read it, anyway, for the gorgeous wildlife photos.
Graphium weiskei, the Purple-Spotted Swallowtail, and its look-alikes are very colorful and attractive butterflies. Their wings iridesce, and also contain some color pigments that produce a pattern that often looks purple, green, blue, and black. The wingspan is usually less than three inches. G.k. gigantor, found more recently on the nearby island called New Britain, may be larger than G.k. kosii.
Graphium kosii live at rather high altitudes and are seldom seen by humans. Though not even close to being the rarest Swallowtails, they are among the rarest in collections. People who recognize kosii as a species usually don't have a clear photo of one.
Nobody seems to know anything about the early stages of this butterfly's life.
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