Hemileuca Numa

Time for another moth post? I can't say I've missed these moths but I shall be glad to have finished the list.

Well, then. Hemileuca nigrovenosa has been classified as a variant of H. burnsi. Of H. nitria, a Mexican species or subspecies, Harrison Dyar wrote in 1911 that it was very similar to H. numa "and maybe a variety of that."  H. norba was apparently identified as a species based on one unusual-looking moth found in Mexico; no more seems to have been written about it, except that the name appears on lists. H. normalis was classified as a variant form of H. eglanterina. This brings us to H. numa itself, a very scantly documented species or subspecies found in Mexico. 

Photo from Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network.

Hemileuca numa is a small, drab moth. It may look pale gray with the usual Hemileuca band of color shading, and mid-wing spots with a comma-shaped marking in the center; it may show only part of this typical Hemileuca pattern, with colors fading to off-white toward the outer edge of the wing; or it may look off-white and translucent, similar to H. dyari. In a museum that has a pair, the male's wings are clearly marked while the female (shown above) is almost white, Whether this is a consistent pattern of sex dimorphism or a less predictable instance of individual variation seems to be unknown..

Photo by Coletoobservador, taken in March. 

Though the whole genus Hemileuca are known for being madly variable and hard to classify, the Lepidoptera Mundi site has lined up typical specimens of each species for comparison: Photos rather than actual moths were lined up; H. magnifica looks no bigger than H. electra, though in real life it is bigger. H. numa looks smaller than the others, as in real life it is.

https://lepidoptera.eu/thumbnails/019/XX/Saturniidae/up

Flying in March is atypical for the genus Hemileuca but the species is not well enough documented to say whether the individual photographed in March was normal. Eggs, host plants, and larvae appear to be undocumented on the Internet. Si tenemos lectores mexicanos, seria facil llegar primero con foto clara. US naturalists classified this species together with oliviae as "Range Caterpillars" that eat grass and were suspected of eating corn, about a hundred years ago. Their fears and suspicions are now regarded as a mistake; their guesses about the life cycle of H. numa may or may not have been any more accurate. 

One source does have clear photos of the pupa. The pupa is blackish all over and seems to be trying to look like a pebble. 

Photo from Explorando con Ale Montse at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=960689314446363&id=392438654604768&set=a.430248520823781 .

Butterfly of the Week for 7.29.24: Eurytides Thyastes

Eurytides thyastes is a long-tailed Kite Swallowtail found from Mexico to Paraguay and in all the countries between. Abundant in some of its range, it's never appeared to be in any danger. Its wings are a bright school bus yellow that some even call orange, and they call this species the Orange Kite. The head and upper thorax are black with a row of yellow spots along either side, nd the rest of the body is yellow with a row of black spots.

Photo by Edgarabel, of subspecies panamensis, taken in Panama in October. 

Only recently have South Americans discovered the international market for photographs of these butterflies. Photos of males "lekking" (and licking) at puddles are abundant; they show that although male thyastes aren't always averse to the company of their own kind, they're more often found as the only one of their species in a mixed crowd of mostly smaller butterflies. 

Photo by Blubayou, who snapped it in Ecuador in July. Although the butterflies can only stand and sip very shallow water, they're attracted to fast-moving, well aerated water. 

Male Swallowtails are notoriously hard to photograph well; females, spending more of their time looking for host plants on which to lay eggs, seem rarely to be photographed at all. They "zoom" over treetops, flutter their wings even when sipping water or flower nectar, and apparently enjoy basking in the mist at spectacular waterfalls humans dare to approach only by helicopter/

Five subspecies are currently recognized: E. thyastes thyastes, found in Brazil and Paraguay; E.t. marchandii, found in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize; E.t. occidentalis, found in western Mexico; E.t. panamensis, found in Panama, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Ecuador; and E.t. thyastinus, found in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and some localities in Brazil. They're all yellow with slightly different configurations of black stripes and spots. (People have thought for a long time that it was funny that Nicaragua wasn't on that list. Yes, thyastes have been found in Nicaragua.)

Of these, Rothschild classified marchandii as a separate species, panamensis as a subspecies of marchandi. He also raised the question whether the yellow color darkens with age, which seems still unanswered. And other early writers were downright emphatic about the belief that marchandii was only "remotely related" to thyastes.

Photo by Jonathan Janse, taken in Ecuador in April.

Photo by Robert Gallardo, documenting how dramatically this species' underwings fade. Gallardo has written a guidebook and guided tours for "butterflying" in Honduras.

https://blog.naturalistjourneys.com/category/butterflies/

There has been some debate about the name, with people wanting to reclassify this species into new genera to be called Protographium, Neographium, or perhaps Eurygraphium. I found about equal amounts of worthwhile content by searching for Eurytides thyastes and for Neographium thyastes.

Why thyastes and thyastinus? Who was Thyastes? The first Swallowtails named were traditionally named after heroes of ancient literature. Google doesn't recognize the name or story of Thyastes. When not reading Thyastes as the name of a yellow butterfly found in South America, Google goes to the story of Thyestes. Thyestes and his brother Atreus were not heroes, even of the tragic kind. They were probably not real people, but just fictional definitions of everything the Greek writers believed was bad. Thyestes and Atreus behaved so vilely as to bring down curses on all their descendants until the family line was extirpated. They were cannibals, murderers of close relatives, child molesters, maybe other things too, anything that showed the lack of that innate moral sense that the Greeks thought distinguished humans from dumb animals. Their story was the kind of thing for which the ancient world invented the word "obscene," ob scaena, a story too ugly to be dramatized on stage. An actor might have been killed if someone thought he'd done the kind of thing a character like Thyestes did, so it became a traditional rule that nobody actually played a character like Thyestes.

Somewhere there ought to be a story about Thyastes, a completely different character, a soldier killed in a battle. a sailor who sighted land before anyone else did, something like that, but Google doesn't know about one.

A Eurytides thyastes is featured in this short, feel-good video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRG4og2R708

Though not the stars of any scene, Eurytides thyastes are among the butterflies in Pedromariposa's slow-motion video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3xf-8YsGM4

Photographer Darrell Gulin sells possibly color-enhanced photos of thyastes sipping from colorful flowers, like this exuberant image now sold in Wal-Mart:

You can buy it at https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Purple-painted-tongue-flowers-with-Eurytides-thyastes-butterfly-Poster-Print-by-Darrell-Gulin-24-x-18-US48DGU1621/6VBUOOQL3SXV , and/or follow Gulin on Instagram for a chance to buy a print of a new picture.

Photo by Yanori_Santos, taken in March in Honduras. This kind of photo is less useful than the people who post it seem to think. We don't know whose hand the butterfly is perching on so we don't know whether the photo is telling us that the butterfly's wingspan is two inches or six inches. Relative to the other butterflies in mixed flocks it looks about three inches--about the size of the larger North American Swallowtails; much smaller than some tropical Swallowtails.

The life cycle of this species is not well documented. Herbert Miers reported that caterpillars eat leaves of the tree Talauma ovata. They have one generation each year, in that part of Brazil at least, and fly in October. 

Photo from Butterflies of America, documenting that the caterpillars can share the pinstriped color pattern and humpbacked but smooth body shape of Eurytides/Boreographium marcellus and the whitish "belt" with many of the large, dark-colored Swallowtails.

Photo from Butterflies of America, documenting that a more fully camouflaged "bird dropping" look is also possible for this species.

David West described different color patterns in pupae, with black-and-white photos, in an article that has been preserved online: They have brown, green, drab, and dark forms.

https://images.peabody.yale.edu/lepsoc/jls/1980s/1987/1987-41(2)114-West.pdf

Photo from Butterflies of America, documenting the peculiar shape these chrysalides can have.

Butterfly of the Week (7.15.24): Salvin's Kite

From the fact that it was named after a living man, Osbert Salvin, rather than a character in ancient literature, we know that this butterfly is somewhat rare and was discovered only recently. It is uncommon in Central America, from Mexico to Belize. It may be most common in Guatemala. (Nobody seems positive about this; in fact some sites disagree about where to look for the butterfly.)

Most Kite Swallowtails are recognized by having some combination of dark and pale stripes. The pale color may look yellow, white, green, or blue, depending on the light and the condition of the wings. The dark color may look black or brown. Salvini is recognized by having more pale and less dark color than the other Kites have. It can be called a white butterfly with narrow black stripes. The upper wing surface is white with narrow black borders and one narrow stripe crossing the tip of the forewing; the underwings show two narrow stripes, one running together with the border. Some sites list "Albino Zebra" as a nickname for this species.

Photo by Markg, who notes that it was taken in Belize in May.

Fair use of photo by Rich Hoyer at https://birdingblogs.com/2010/richhoyer/mayan-mexico-%E2%80%93-a-taste-of-the-tropics , where he mentions that, even in the present century, this may have been the first photo of a living salvini ever published. Photos of this butterfly remain hard to find.

Females are thought to be larger than males. The wingspan of a male museum specimen was recorded as 3.6 inches.

While a few of its haunts are known well enough that some tours list it as a species tourists are likely to see, its life cycle remains undocumented. Typically male Swallowtails spend much of their time sipping water, clean or polluted, at puddles and females spend more of their time finding suitable places to lay their eggs. The scant documentation of this species suggests that its behavior pattern is typical, but nobody is certain about this. 

Butterfly of the Week: Eurytides Oberthueri and/or Philolaus

Is Oberthuer's Kite Swallowtail really a distinct species? It's rare, if it is. Three specimens have been found in two distinct places, Honduras and Mexico. Very little about Eurytides, or Neographium, Protographium, or Protesilaus oberthueri, has been published. If it is a distinct species, it's very similar to E. (or N. or P.) philolaus, of which it's often considered a subspecies. This web site will compromise. We'll consider oberthueri and philolaus together in one post. For those using older lists in alphabetical order, we'll come back to orabilis next week.

Photo by SilvanoLG, documenting that philolaus form large flocks.

In 1906, Walter Rothschild discussed the perplexity entomologists were in about the species of Zebra Swallowtails. He thought ten species, including celadon, arcesilaus, epidaus, and bellerophon, might eventually turn out to be subspecies of Zebras, and discussed them as "the marcellus group." What he called Papilio philolaus was in that group, the Dark Zebra. Its antennae are black rather than amber, but may be "feebly tawny at base." Its legs are pale green. Its tiny claws are shorter than the Zebra's. Its wings usually show black and pale green stripes in patterns slightly different from the Zebra's; some females are almost all black and show only faint shadows of these stripes.

Photo by Juancarlosgarciamorales1, showing a typical male philolaus looking very similar to a large, dark, Southern Zebra Swallowtail. (Wingspans range between 3 and 4 inches.)

The upper wings can be almost entirely black.

Photo by Escalante-Pasos.

Oberthueri differed from philolaus in having a translucent stripe, as well as white stripes. The dark stripes were paler or more translucent, also, and the hind wings narrower. The drawing labelled "Oberthueri" in Rothschild's Novitates Zoologicae looks remarkably like marcellus.

https://archive.org/details/novitateszoologi13lond/page/n822/mode/1up?view=theater

So does the museum specimen here:

Photo from InsectNet.

Some think oberthueri was a natural hybrid between philolaus and one of the paler Kites, probably agesilaus. Many hybrids are "mule" species in which disparate genes inhibit reproduction. That would explain why more oberthueri have not been found. "Mules" recur predictably if and when the same species hybridize; they don't mate with each other and produce a second generation of "mules." Biolib lists oberthueri as a hybrid:

https://www.biolib.cz/cz/taxonsubtaxa/id14955/?subtaxcat=154

But philolaus is fairly abundant. Usually considered a Mexican species, it strays north into the Western States every few years and is found on checklists for southern California and Arizona butterfly watching. In southern Texas it can even be considered native.

Its variability, and the family resemblance of all the Kites, have given philolaus many names. Apart from the ongoing discussion of whether the genus name ought to be Papilio (everyone now agrees that that genus was overcrowded), Eurytides, Protographium, Neographium, or maybe Protesilaus, people have called the species or various possible subspecies ajax, felicis, niger, nigrescens, philenora, plaesiolaus, scheba, vazquezae, xanthicles, and xanticles. Currently xanticles, the southern type, is recognized as a subspecies.

Photo by Sabrewing, explaining that philenora business. Well, yes, if she didn't have those long tails, and had that blue gloss on her wings, she would look a bit like Battus philenor. The name philenor or philenora is traced to the Greek words for "loves her husband." Butterflies don't form pair bonds but she undoubtedly cares as much about her mate as any other butterfly does. (If butterflies, male or female, get more than one opportunity to mate, they will, and the older ones who have mated before will look for young partners who have not.) 

She might look enough like B. philenor to fool a bird, though. The dark Southern subspecies, with yellow spots on the upper wings, are the form for which the name scheba was proposed. Bible stories were generally considered too "sacred" to be included in the general category of ancient literature, but Belqis, the Queen of Sheba, who made a state visit to Suleiman Bin Daoud of Israel, was a character in Arab and African literature too. When male Swallowtails congregate at puddles, their social groups, or leks, are visited by females. Female butterflies are not there to negotiate terms of international trade, but then, male writers have always fantasized that that wasn't why Belqis visited Suleiman either. 

Xanthicles is one of those European names that combine two words more or less randomly, without regard to any meaning the resulting phrase has. Xanthos is the Greek word for light-colored, blond, yellow, dun; one web site points out that light brown and red hair were also considered "light-colored." Cleis is the word for fame and glory. The name Xanthicles or Xanticles appears in ancient literature, though not as the name of a major character in any story. Eurytides (or Protographium) philolaus xanticles has a yellow color, rather than blue-green, in its light-colored sections. 

Photo by Andreshs.

Bright yellow color is the distinguishing feature of the subspecies xanthicles, but it fades quickly. Older butterflies and museum specimens are brown and tan, rather than black and yellow. The yellow color may shade to off-white or pale green on the underside of the wings. 

Photo by camilojotage. Though this large mixed flock of Swallowtail and other butterflies is not unusual, its clear focus is, because philolaus and other swallowtails fan their wings almost constantly, even while sipping water from wet sand. 

Why do they flutter so much? To cool off? Possibly, though other butterflies survive without spending their energy this way. To confuse predators? Probably, though, again, other butterflies get by without this behavior. To preserve inter-butterfly space at a crowded puddle? Likely, though they do it when they're not crowded. To advertise themselves, scenting the air with an odor humans don't seem to notice, giving females an idea of how many of the males at the puddle are ready to mate? Possibly, though female Swallowtails, most of whom are ready to start unloading their eggs when they crawl out of their chrysalides, would probably find males and wait for them to mature anyway. To make themselves more of a challenge and thus more interesting to photographers? Probably not, although the behavior has that effect, and it may benefit the butterflies. The true answer may well be "because they can." 

Video of a large flock, fluttering, while wind rustles nearby plants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq9PA0C

Though not economically important, it is popular enough to have appeared on postage:

Photo from Avionstamps.com.

The few photos available of couples of this species show that they can mate face to face, each clinging to one side of a twig. Females then flit off to the bushes to lay eggs, and males return to their leks and wait to another chance to mate. 

Caterpillars have that humpbacked Swallowtail look, the fleshy "horns" of the forked osmeterium tucked away on their upper backs. They have pairs of white blotches that can form stripes running for part or all of the length of a black or green body.

Photo by Thibaudaronson.

Photo by Karla_bal30. 

Photo by Tristan_menant-leclercq, documenting their tidy habit of eating their outgrown skins. Various arrangements of black, white, and olive green patches are possible for this caterpillar. The overall effect seems to be in the look-like-a-bird-dropping category of survival strategies for caterpillars.

Caterpillars eat shrubs in the Annonaceae family, the family that includes North American pawpaw trees. How many different species of leaves they can eat, or how their selections affect their looks, is not documented.

Neither egg nor chrysalis photos are available online at the time of writing, though Inaturalist has some clear long-range photos of females flitting among host plants and palpating leaves.

The life cycle of these butterflies has not been fully documented. Adults fly between March and September, and are most often seen in May.

Butterfly of the Week: Mexican Kite

It looks like one of the northern specimens of Eurytides (or whatever) marcellus, the Zebra Swallowtail: white with a few thin black stripes, and usually with a long "tail" tip on each hind wing. Only it's not in the northern part of its range where marcellus looks like that. It's in the southern part, typically Mexico, where Zebras are bigger and seem clearly to be black with a few pale green stripes. Its wings may be more transparent, and they show a red stripe that can run the full length of the underside of the hind wing. A close observer like Jeffrey Glassberg, of Swift Guide fame, would note that it has a broader pale area on the outside edge of the forewings than other striped Swallowtails, this pale area often almost completely scaleless and transparent. It's a different butterfly. Different sources give it different names, but it's most often called Eurytides (or whatever) epidaus,  the Mexican Kite. 

Photo from the Reiman Gardens.

Guatemalans prefer to call it the Guatemalan Kite. The names Long-tailed Kite, Pale Kite, and White Kite are also found, and some people just feel that with its black and white stripes, the butterfly has to qualify as some sort of Zebra. Though it feeds on another tree in the genus Annona and looks closely related to the State Butterfly of Tennessee, they don't hybridize.

Two views of one butterfly from tropicleps.ch. 

In Spanish kites, the toys, are cometas, and so are Kite Swallowtails. In Mexico this one is the Mariposa cometa de cola golondrina mexicana. In casual speech this might be shortened to cometa golondrina mexicana. Cola means a tail, golondrina means a swallow bird, mariposa means a butterfly. That's a mouthful, but the subspecies epidaus is the m.c. de c.g.m. del golfo, the Gulf Mexican Kite Swallowtail Butterfly.

In Latin Eurytides means "broad shape," describing the wings in contrast to the Longwing butterfly family's wings. Protographium means "first, earliest Graphium," expressing faith that the Graphium genus evolved from this genus; Neographium has also been used, expressing faith that this genus evolved from the Graphium genus. (Many sources prefer Eurytides, but a majority of the more scholarly sources published online use Protographium.) Epidaus was not the name of a major hero of ancient literature, but may be a short form of Epidaurus, which is the name of a town in Greece whose origin story used to claim that it was named for its founder. Tepicus and fenochionis identify the western subspecies with places.

Lots of people have photographed this butterfly and drawn pictures of it. A picture of epidaus was used on postage in Nicaragua; the stamps can still be bought from Colnect. There are a few epidaus videos online: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr-1xxsvwAg

This short Twitter video shows the butterfly licking a man's finger, suggesting that epidaus is one of the Swallowtail species in which males participate in "puddling," the Swallowtails' form of a behavior scientists call "lekking." In some animal species unpaired males hang out in groups called "leks," sometimes jousting for status, sometimes just waiting to reach mating age. In Swallowtails the lekking sites are sources of shallow, usually polluted, liquid, which contain the mineral salts the male butterflies need. Females need the minerals too, but usually absorb their share through contact with males and sip only clean water, flower nectar, and occasionally fruit juice. Thus, although females are primarily pollinators, in some Swallowtail species males are composters. However, their taste in minerals varies; some male Swallowtails are attracted to dung and carrion and even motor oil, while others meet their mineral needs by sipping bitter or brackish water. 

https://twitter.com/webcamsdemexico/status/1129931322808360960?lang=en

This longer video, narrated in Spanish, offers a close-up view of the caterpillar, magnified enough that you can see that (like all "hairless" caterpillars) it actually does have short fine hair, and can see it leaving tiny trails where it licks the leaf, or the woman's finger. You can see its pulse. I think I even see an internal parasite--its skin is translucent as its wings will be, if it lives to grow wings. A real test of tolerance for caterpillar gross-outs...Well. No. The video includes no frass and no shell eating. The really disgusting part of the video was the advertisement. If I don't describe it, maybe you'll see a different, less disgusting one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLDCLp9Vrmc

The same woman narrates a much prettier video documenting the life cycle of a butterfly who starts out with a different pattern of cryptic coloration from any of the caterpillars photographed below, pupates on a potted plant, and emerges as a butterfly whose forewings never have scales along the outer edges. Also in Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuMeqyyAQWc

Butterflies inspired artwork even before Columbus' time. Ancient butterfly images were not drawn from life so it's hard to be sure which species were portrayed, but some ancient butterfly carvings clearly seem to have been inspired by Swallowtails. Possibly by Mexican Kites.

https://thebutterflydiaries.wordpress.com/tag/teotihuacan/

Ryan Fessenden's videos aren't as informative as they might be, but one of them did give me a chortle. As most butterfly fanciers know, one of the other butterfly families that are generally smaller than the Swallowtails is known as the Whites. One species of White butterfly was given the name pamela, so it's the Pamela White. It happens that some female Pamela Whites are not white. All of them have colored markings, but some of them are, primarily...brown! Fessenden doesn't say it--it's too easy--but he shows us a photo of what logically ought to be called the Pamela Brown! (There's a family of butterflies that are normally brown; they are, illogically, called the Nymphs and Satyrs, which leaves "Pamela Brown" available as a nickname for brown-winged Pamela Whites.) 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/blog/2020/04/

(Young people may not get it. "Pamela Brown" was a song, the national anthem of all young adults who enjoyed being bachelors, back when people my age were young adults. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cweBs-tdaA )

This Brazilian site, set up to address the questions of insect-phobic readers, mentions that epidaus is one of the Swallowtails that smell "bad." It opened in Portuguese for me; I used Google Translate to get the quoted word "bad." It does not tackle the question of whether epidaus is only a primary pollinator, or the primary pollinator, for custard-apples, the fruit of Annona reticulata, which local humans eat. (Custard-apples have been considered the most important member, economically, of a plant/fruit family that also includes pawpaws, soursops, sweetsops, cherimoya and more.) 

https://pictureinsect.com/pt/wiki/Protographium_epidaus.html

Scientists currently recognize three subspecies. In fact individual variation makes it hard to define how to classify an individual in a subspecies without knowing where it was found. Eduardo Nuple Juarez has at least proposed a math-based rule for classification. 

http://132.248.9.195/ptd2017/noviembre/0767836/0767836.pdf

E. epidaus epidaus is found in the eastern parts of Mexico and Central America. It appears on checklists for Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. (If by any chance you're going to visit one of those countries, you can use those links to download a printable checklist.) Their forewings tend to become scaleless and transparent only in the pale stripe at the outer edge. Their wings can look pale green in some lights, as Zebra Swallowtails' wings do.

Photo from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com.

E. epidaus tepicus and E.e. fenochionis are found in northwestern and southwestern Mexico, respectively. Tepicus was recognized as a subspecies by Rothschild et al. in 1906; fenochionis has sometimes been listed as a separate species. Their forewings can be transparent all the way across the top edge. The pattern of wing striping and scale loss differs just noticeably.

Eurytides (or Protographium) epidaus tepicus photograph from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com.

E. (or P.) epidaus fenochionis photo from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com.

They live in forests that have distinct "wet" and "dry" seasons. They sip water from shallow puddles and wet sand. Fenochionis, at least, seem to tolerate one another's company...

Flock of fenochionis "puddling" from momoto-erick at inaturalist.mma.gob.cl. That site, and others, also document that small groups of these butterflies sometimes mingle with larger groups of mixed species while puddling.

This photo essay is primarily about a similar-looking species, P. (or E.) dariensis, but contains photos of the life cycle of P. (or E.) epidaus. The text is in Spanish, but (1) scientific jargon is meant to be internationally accessible, so it's easy Spanish, and (2) translation software.

https://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr/paginas-de-especies/insectos/113-papilionidae/5291-i-protographium-dariensis-i-papilionidae

Ah, here's the site I really wanted. Well, Google did put it nearer the top than that other site. Their write-up of epidaus paints a peculiar picture. Butterfly reproduction takes place by means of a spermatophore, or "sperm package," transferred from male to female. As the outer covering of the "package" dissolves, it breaks down into those minerals the females are too nice to slurp up out of polluted puddles, and other nutrients. Viable sperm cells join with ova; less viable sperm material is digested along with the outer coat of the spermatophore. Acguanacaste makes it sound as if the female reached inside herself and sorted out the sperm cells, which of course she doesn't. What she spends her time doing, with her voluntary muscles, is finding suitable leaves and laying eggs by ones. Sperm selection is part of her job, in a manner of speaking, but it's a set of chemical reactions that take place inside her.

https://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr/paginas-de-especies/insectos/113-papilionidae/5292-i-protographium-epidaus-i-papilionidae

Eggs are laid by ones, and resemble little white beads. Annona reticulata is listed as the usual host plant, with some sources mentioning that the butterflies may also use Annona glabra and some species of Rollinia. 

Photo from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com.

Caterpillars don't try to look like centipedes. Their skin is relatively smooth. This hatchling shows the white "belt" marking found on many other baby Swallowtails.

They have the humpbacked body shape that conceals an osmeterium. 

Though not all caterpillars show this top/side contrast color pattern, it probably has some survival value. It falls into the category of cryptic coloration. A predator looking at this pattern might have to look twice to realize that it was looking at a small, slow-moving, not highly toxic, really almost defenseless little animal. 

Caterpillar sequence from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com. These are relatively small caterpillars; they will become relatively small butterflies, for Swallowtails. All fenochionis shown matured from black to green; some specimens of E. epidaus epidaus went through an orange stage:

Some kept the black and white color scheme:

The photographer known as Syntheticpurples didn't say what person did to get this individual to put out its osmeterium, nor whether its bird-repellent scent was unpleasant or even noticeable to humans. 

Photo from inaturalist.ala.org.au. This caterpillar's lower sides look almost exactly like the leaf on which it's sitting...now that's camouflage!

As shown in the video above, although these caterpillars don't use silk to pull leaves together around themselves, make nests, or wrap their chrysalides in cocoons, they do drool as continually as other caterpillars, and their saliva hardens into silk. Benodelacruz does not explain how he kept this caterpillar drooling on his fingertip long enough to produce a visible layer of silk. Usually, when caterpillars can taste that they're walking on something inedible, they keep walking until they come to the kind of leaf they can eat.

Photo by Benodelacruz at inaturalist.mma.gob.cl.

"Mature" caterpillars are 3 to 4 cm long, less than 2 inches, and adult butterflies' wingspan is usually given as 4 to 5 cm. Some butterflies reportedly measure 3 inches or more across the wings. 

Chrysalides look like broken dead leaves. They can be black or dark gray as well as brown or green. These butterflies have overlapping generations. They reproduce continuously, mother butterflies laying an egg here and an egg there throughout their lives, caterpillars pupating for anywhere from twelve days to ten months. They live in places where the weather tends to be warm to hot all year, so seasons make little difference to them. 

Photo from ButterfliesOfAmerica.com.

Butterfly of the Week: Yellow Kite

The Yellow (or Orange) Kite Swallowtail is not, in fact, the bright yellow-orange Kite; its color is pale yellow, sometimes greenish or whitish, depending on the light and the degree of individual fading. Its wingspan is usually about three and a half inches.

 

Photo by Hakeen. 

It is also called Eurytides calliste, or Protographium calliste. The most obvious result of changing the name, which some web sites are in process of doing this summer, is to make photos and articles about an already obscure species even harder to find. Eurytides refers to the "broad shape" of its wings, in contrast to the Longwings. Protographium means "the first, earliest, Graphium" and refers to a belief that the South American Kite Swallowtails evolved earlier than the Asian Swordtails.  Calliste means "the most beautiful." The tradition in naming Swallowtail species used to be to name them after characters in ancient literature, and several characters were called Calliste, or Callista, or Callisto. 

In Spanish they are cometa, or mariposa de cola golondrina (two translations for "Swallowtail butterfly") amarilla. Another name found at some sites is cebra. This is unnecessarily confusing because Eurytides or Protographium marcellus, the Zebra Swallowtail, is found in some parts of Mexico and is a completely different species--though the species are considered to be "related."

Widespread in Central and South America, calliste seems to be uncommon and, even in places where some claim it is threatened, not well documented. The Guatemalan government lists it as a threatened, protected species: 

https://conap.gob.gt/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Lista-de-Especies-Amenazadas-en-Guatemala-LEA-2.pdf

The species as a whole is "not known to be threatened." It seems close to being not known at all. It seems somehow typical that a web search for scientific papers about this species pulls up papers like the one linked below. (After a short summary in English, the main substance of the paper is in Spanish/) Calliste is mentioned in a reference note; the paper is about Mexico's wealth of butterfly habitat and species. In fact Mexico already has established Monarch butterfly habitat as a worldwide tourist destination, and could easily add other species to the butterfly enthusiasts' itineraries. 

https://mariposasmexicanas.fciencias.unam.mx/images/stories/pdf/Papilionoidea-Lepidoptera.pdf

Photo by Bredenemilurquia. 

It can be confused with the species dioxippus. According to the Swift Guide, the two species look almost alike but show a consistent difference in the thin yellow stripes in the dark borders of the underides of the forewings. Calliste's stripes cross the black band; dioxippus's don't. 

There is a subspecies, Protographium calliste olbius. It is on average slightly larger, and has slight differences in the color pattern. There is some size and color variation among individuals but P. calliste calliste, from Mexico and Guatemala, show consistent variation from P. c. olbius from Costa Rica and Panama.

Photo from Butterflies of America; olbius from Panama.

The food plant for calliste is believed to be Magnolia dealbata, the cloudforest magnolia. This big tree could easily host several solitary caterpillars in a season, and no other caterpillar feeds on it.. However, although we have seen photo evidence that some of the Kite Swallowtails do not require a great deal of space, some butterfly species in this family are known to have habits that keep their distribution sparse. One of the first things I observed about butterflies as a child was that Zebra Swallowtails will join big flocks of Tiger Swallowtails and other species at puddles, but you never see more than two Zebras together. Brighter yellow Eurytides salvini are said to chase each other away from puddles, and North America's Eurytides or Protographium marcellus are one of those shell-eating species in which the caterpillars' natural instinct to eat their own outgrown skins is not offset by any instinct to back off when they find a skin of their own species while a sibling is living in it. Fratello complains that where Graphium species he was studying formed great flocks at puddles, the Eurytides he was studying on a trip through Central America seemed to travel by ones. Butterflies that depend totally on a single food plant can rarely afford to live close together. 

Photo by Michael Graupe. No one seems ever to have described the differences between male and female in this species. If my guess is correct about calliste's social behavior resembling marcellus's, the fact that these two are sipping water close together may indicate that the differences in their patterns are secondary sex characteristics. (You don't see marcellus fighting; you see them looking for places where each one can be the only male or female marcellus n the neighborhood. They are somewhat rare. Note, however, that in a few places where their food plant, Asimina triloba, is abundant some people do claim to have seen marcellus in flocks.)

Though they are, like many butterflies, most easily photographed sipping water from puddles, Kites also sip nectar from flowers. Here is calliste's claim to pollinator species status:

Photo by Desertnaturalist.

No one seems ever to have documented the life cycle of  these butterflies. They're pretty, they're somewhat useful to humans, and they live in places where other butterflies are even more attention-catching. Usually Swallowtails command lots of attention, but when the competition for attention includes Monarchs and Morphos and Blue Swallowtails...

Butterfly of the Week: Short-Lined Kite

Tennessee's official butterfly emblem, the Zebra Swallowtail, looks strange, exotic, unique among North American butterflies. There are actually several species that resemble it--the Kite Swallowtails. The other Kites are found in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere. This week, we consider Eurytides agesilaus, the Short-Lined Kite.

Photo from lepidigi.net.

Eurytides is Greek for "wide form or shape," where "wide" was understood to mean mean a different shape from the "long" wings of another butterfly family. In the tradition of naming Swallowtails after heroes of ancient literature, Agesilaus was a King of Sparta who won two wars and lost one. 

"Short-lined" describes the butterflies' color pattern, with short black lines crossing the pale wings. 

This species has gone through a few names. As a Swallowtail it was first called Papilio agesilaus. Another name for the genus was Protographium. Some of the subspecies have also been identified as separate species. An early description of something Hewitson described a distinct species he called Papilio conon, which he said was different from agesilaus, but other naturalists didn't think its differences even qualified it to be counted as a subspecies. . 

Several Greek men's names, meaning "(whatever) of the people, the tribe, the nation," end in "laus" and were given to what were described as species with resemblances to agesilaus; Three of those species are now recognized as subspecies of agesilaus. 

Their wingspan is typically about three inches. Males and females look pretty much alike. Females tend to have bigger white spots on the underside of the hind wings than males do, but, as with other gender differences between Swallowtails, this rule is not always reliable; as we've seen, female Swallowtails tend to look different from males, except for the individuals that don't.

They are found in Mexico and several parts of Central and South America. They are not believed to be endangered. 

Seven subspecies are recognized. The "nominate" subspecies, E. agesilaus agesilaus, lives in Colombia and Venezuela. 

E.a. eimeri, found in Costa Rica, Panama, and western Colombia, has a transparent band on each forewing. 

E.a. fortis, native to Mexico, has wider black bands, and E.a. neosilaus, found in Mexico and Central America, has narrower ones.

Photo of fortis by Morthoblue.

Photo of neosilaus by Sandradennis in Mexico. 

E.a. autosilaus has a black band "divided" by a ale streak on each wing. It is found near the Caribbean coast, in Venezuela, Brazil, and south into Peru.

Photo of autosilaus by Ombeline_Sculfort in French Guyana. 

E.a. montanum is found in Peru, while E.a. viridis is found in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Photo of viridis by Salvador Mazza.

They can be gregarious, forming large flocks, as documented by Huatulco in Mexico: 

Photo by Huatulco at Biodiversity4All.com. This flock behavior is observed in several Swallowtail species. What seems to be going on in this behavior, which is described generally as "lekking" or more Swallowtail-specifically as "puddling," is that male butterflies emerge from their pupal shell a few days before they're ready to mate. They spend these days hanging out with other males, drinking water--often polluted water, by choice, since the mineral salts found in brackish or polluted water are what they need to help them mature. Female butterflies lack the taste for polluted water, and also tend to be ready to mate as soon as they unfold their wings, but they are likely to have to wait for the males to grow up. So the puddle becomes a lek--a site where unmated male animals gather, sometimes fighting for status, sometimes just hanging out, and an occasional female moves to the edge of the group and watches what the males are doing. Eventually one or more of the males will feel ready to leave the lek and wander off in the company of a female spectator. Female butterflies in these species are primarily pollinators who sip flower nectar, while males are primarily composters who sip mineral-rich water--although males sip nectar too, and females sip usually cleaner water. Females need mineral salts too, but they usually get their minerals from the male during mating. 

Photo by Francofran. Both males and females sip clean water. . 

Human sweat contains mineral salts. It's not unusual for male butterflies who like polluted puddles to perch on a human and slurp the salt off our skin. 

Photo by Marcoantonio23. 

Adult butterflies are easy to find and photograph. Everyone seems to have a picture of agesilaus puddling. About the earlier stages of heir lives, nothing seems to have been written. South American sources say the host plant is Rollinia emarginata but show no photos of eggs, caterpillars, or pupae.