This week's butterfly is not rare or thought to be endangered. It doesn't have "swallow tails" on its hind wings, either. In fact it seems to be a mimic of a Brush-Footed Butterfly; it's trying to look more like our Monarchs than like our Swallowtails. Although it's smaller than many of the other Swallowtails with whom it hangs out at puddles, its wingspan is three to four inches--as big as our Monarchs.
Photo by Sebastien Delonglee. In the Asian countries where Graphium macareus lives, it's called the Lesser Zebra because Graphium xenocles is called the Great Zebra. In this photo G. xenocles is on the left, macareus on the right. Delonglee observed that the Great Zebra kept flapping his wings as he drank while the Lesser Zebra was able to hold his wings still for several seconds.
Here are videos showing Graphium macareus and other butterflies at a puddle. None of the Swallowtails shown seems to be very good at holding its wings still. As they fly, some show the hairy scent folds on the inside edges of their hind wings. Butterflies recognize each other by scent; sources don't mention humans noticing the scent of Graphium macareus but to other butterflies the males probably have a strong odor.
"Black form?" Yes. Graphium macareus is, like other Swallowtail species, variable. Some of the variation is regular enough to define regional subspecies; although macareus is considered a common species, some subspecies are rare. Subspecies names identify several subspecies with places. Individuals can look black with white spots and stripes, or white with black spots and stripes. How rounded or pointed the fore wings are also varies considerably.
Not all subspecies have been documented online, but the following subspecies names are found online--some with multiple web pages, some only as names on lists:
albinovanus
burmensis
Photo by Antonio Giudici, Thaibutterflies.com. Museum specimens of burmensis and indochinensis are arranged like a photo essay at Yutaka.it:
dawna (not always recognized; often lumped into indochinensis, though people who recognize dawna say it's found in a different pattern on the map). This subspecies flies at higher altitudes than the others and shows less white on the fore wings and more on the hind wings. It was named for the Dawna Mountains.
indicum or indicus
indochinensis
Photo by Antonio Giudici at Thaibutterflies.com.
lioneli
Photo from WorldFieldGuide.com.
macaristus
Photo by Jamiun.
maccabaeus (now considered the same thing as palawanicola): Ahmet Kocak wrote, "I propose a new name palawanicola (nom. nov.) for maccabaeus Staudinger, which is invalid, as it is junior primary homonym of Papilio maccabaeus Herbst." Judah Maccabee, the war chief whose adventures are printed in some Bibles, had already had a Swallowtail named after him.
mitis
palawanicola: two photos at
Still listed as subspecies maccabaeus at WorldFieldGuide.com although Kocak's paper came out long enough ago to be archived at Funet.fi.
perakensis
Yutaka.it shows the recognizable female form with almost no white spots, one almost completely sable above and below, one marked like the male above but almost solid sable below.
Perakensis is also found in Thailand:
xanthosoma: so called for its yellowish body
And, of course, there's Graphium macareus macareus, first found on Java island.
ButterflyCircle documents the richness of butterflies and other animals at a nature park on Borneo:
Females are a little more likely to fade from black to brown, as do some males. The ones that lay eggs are females. In some subspecies either the females are rare, or the variations that make it obvious to the naked eye that individuals are female are rare.
Regular readers already know how the genus Papilio was split into smaller genera including Graphium and, there being so many different Graphiums with different looks that form distinct species groups, some scientists want to split the genus Graphium into smaller genera including Pathysa.
Males of this species are extremely gregarious. Whatever they smell like to other butterflies, the other butterflies probably like it. At puddles they crowd together with others of their own species or of different species, even with composter insects that aren't butterflies at all, as shown in the video above. Their food plant seems to be abundant enough that they can enjoy the benefits of safety-in-numbers. Females are harder to find; they probably, like many female Swallowtails, spend almost all their time in the woods where they look like shadows.
Even if Liew hadn't asked people not to gank photos from the page above, the collection is too spectacular to split up. You have to see all of the photos. I feel the same way about the page linked below, although most of the butterflies shown aren't Swallowtails--the idea is to give a sample of the rich diversity of species found in the one nature park.
Most of these butterflies fly in March, some appearing in February and some lingering into April, but their life cycle does not always take a full year. In some years, in some places, some individuals fly at other times of year. In some places butterfly watchers say they've only ever seen the one generation of macareus that fly mostly in March.
Macareus, or Macar, was a character in ancient Greek literature. He was identified as the son of Aeolus, but it may always have been unclear whether this referred to the wind god or the king of Tyrrhenia, whether his sad story was historical or mythical. He was found guilty of a sin Greek Pagans considered unpardonable, so he had to kill himself. Christianity did not introduce rules and guilt to people who had been free to do what they liked, but introduced the idea that they could hope to be forgiven. The tradition was that Swallowtails were named after heroes of literature. Maybe Macareus was seen as heroic in accepting the judgment passed on him. Or he was chosen, in spite of his being a bad example rather than a hero in literature, because Graphium ramaceus lives in some of the same places and someone thought the idea of separating ramaceus from macareus sounded amusing.
Butterfly collectors chat about macareus and ramaceus:
The early life of this species has not been well documented. An early German source says, in a rare example of a German sentence I can read without consulting a dictionary and grammar book, "Die Puppe ist gruen."
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