Or Miombo Lady, or Tabora or Miombo White Lady, Swordtail, Swallowtail... Graphium taboranus looks very similar to Graphium arisbe, Graphium schaffgotschi, Graphium morania, and others, so some authorities don't even list them as separate species. Some sources list Graphium arisbe taboranus or Graphium taboranus morania or some other combination as if these are only subspecies. This view may be fully accepted some day. Scientists have yet to gather enough facts about these butterflies to debate intelligently.
There are also scientists who want to split the Graphium genus, which certainly has a lot of species in it, and use Arisbe as the genus name. I only report these things.
Anyway Graphium taboranus, which for our present purposes we shall accept as a species, is found near a mountain called Tabora, and in and near a forest called Miombo, and in several places in sub-Saharan Africa. Is the species endangered, or is it just that some local populations have declined sharply? How could you tell? Even experts who dissect dead butterflies aren't too positive about identifying the White Lady species. They're not exactly alike, but casual visitors to nature parks can't be sure which is which when the butterflies are flapping their wings.
Graphium taboranus is reported from Zambia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has a wide range. It's not uncommon or thought to be endangered, but is believed to be less common than the look-alike species that share its range. In Angola, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, it is probably active for most or all of the year. It is believed to live on trees in the genus Annona, small trees that typically have toxic leaves but bear edible fruit.
As a result of this confusion, there aren't a lot of photos of living Graphium taboranus on the Internet. It's popular--it's featured on postage stamps--but all people know for sure is that it looks like other butterflies that share its range. There are no photos of this species on sites like Inaturalist. Of 189 links Google pulled up in a search for this species, over 150 were just checklists of all the Graphium species.
At the time of writing, one of these Botswana stamps was for sale for $7 on EBay:
Taboranus means "of or from Tabora" and doesn't sound like either of the two English words it can be broken into. When words Caesar never heard are "Latinized" there's room for legitimate differences of opinion about how they ought to sound. Not this one. In English, at least, it's ta-BOR-an-us.
Photo by Adalbert Seitz, 1924, public domain.
Photos ofa female museum specimen, top and bottom views,are at the bottom of page 19 of
Graphium taboranus could and may hybridize with look-alike species arisbe, endochus, morania, ridleyanus, and schaffgotschi. Filling in the records of how these butterflies are alike and different, how they live, and whether they are especially valuable to humans or merely an important part of the ecosystem, are still wide-open opportunities for Africans to become famous.
The life cycle is currently undocumented. By now regular readers can guess what the egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis will be found to look like. It remains for Africans to confirm or disprove our guesses.
No comments:
Post a Comment