Passing quickly over Graphium pelopidas, which is still found on some lists but usually classified as a subspecies of Graphium leonidas,
we come to Graphium phidias, named after the sculptor credited with supervising the building of the Parthenon in ancient Greece.
Photo by Nicholas Jason.
It is found in only a small part of the world, the corner where China, Laos, and Vietnam meet. Like most animals specific to that habitat, it's been very poorly documented. Although its coloration may interest artists, scientists who've written anything about it have mostly been interested in how to fit it into a theory of macroevolution. It has "swallow tails," but very thin ones, more like the Hairstreaks than like the other Swordtails, so it must represent the point at which tailed Swordtails evolved into tailless Ladies, or maybe vice versa...
This web site is sorry that macroevolution is speculation, not science, and thus hard for this web site to take seriously. Macroevolution evolved to assuage the cognitive dissonance experienced by people who try to study the living world while denying that it has a Creator. The position of this web site is that those people would feel better if they sat down and made a list of all the things they've done that harmed other people, and then set about making restitution to those people, giving themselves a chance to understand the Higher Power in whatever way they can. The Graphium species are similar enough that some of them may have microevolved into or out of others, but what benefit would there be in knowing that they did, if they did? Why can't more scientists come to terms with the fact that it's not possible to know everything in a scientific way, and, if either creation or macroevolution can mean anything to anybody, they have to be understood by faith rather than science?
Some scientists prefer to use the subgenus name Arisbe or Paranticopsis for phidias, though they don't agree on which one to use. More than its op-art stripes make this a peculiar-looking butterfly. The species name has sometimes been given as akikoae, and a 2007 paper even gave what seems to have been the same butterfly a new species name, muhabbet.
This photo by K. Saito shows the subspecies, G.p. obscurium, which has much smaller orange spots on the hind wings.
Adam Cotton says that the reason why they're so seldom seen is that their preferred altitude is over
1,500m, about 5,000 feet, above sea level, and they fly for only a week or two each year. He says that males sometimes come down to altitudes as low as 500m to gather at puddles. Females make themselves hard to find, but males sometimes visit their favorite spots in numbers--five or ten at a time.
Nothing is known about the life cycle of this species. Opportunities for southeast Asian students to become famous are wide open.
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