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 for 7.22.24: Eurytides Serville

I'm still playing catch-up, because a funny thing happens when I look up all the fun facts on the Internet about an animal species. It's similar to what happens when I write e-books. I do one at a time, and then my brain says "Enough. Let's do something else," and it does. At least it won't snap directly to another butterfly, or another book...

Anyway, today's featured butterfly is Eurytides serville, the Serville Kite or Serville Swordtail. "Swordtail" is usually reserved for the Graphium species, which occupy a comparable ecological niche in India, but serville does have very long tails. Because both the antennae and the swallowtails end in pale tips that can sometimes iridesce bright yellow or orange, it's sometimes called the Orange-Clubbed Kite. Because of the uneven edges of the lower wings, which flutter in the air as the butterflies fly, it's been called the Frilled Kite. The scientific name commemorates a place in France; it can be translated as "village of serfs" but may originally have had a meaning more appealing to the medieval French mind. The first specimen described belonged to a Monsieur de Serville (and the first descriptions were in French and Latin).

(Serfs were different from slaves in one important way: a slave could be sold whenever and wherever his owner found a buyer, while a serf could only be sold along with the land on which he lived. He had no control over the use of the land and could be ordered to participate in land use of which he might not approve, but he had a right to stay in his ancestral home.)

Why was it named so late? It's common, widespread, and not noticeably threatened. It's found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. It looks similar to some variants of E. columbus, and some writers still don't sound positive that it's a distinct species. Some list it as a subspecies of columbus .Rothschild noted that the species look most similar in the parts of their range that overlap, and speculated that they might hybridize.

https://archive.org/details/novitateszoologi13lond/page/n748/mode/1up?view=theater

Photo by Rogerritt, taken in Peru in November. This photo and many others at nature sites document that serville can be positively gregarious. Males hang out together at puddles, sipping mineral-rich water and waiting to become ready to mate. They seem to make no effort to be the only one of their sex and species in the neighborhood. The puddles attract large mixed flocks of butterflies of different species. 

This slow-motion video of serville and other butterflies' puddling behavior, in Peru, doesn't tell us anything we didn't know by now, but it's a great way to relax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj8P1h8xu_g

Here a male serville seems to challenge a smaller member of the Swallowtail family, Mimoides xeniades, presumably for status in the group. Butterflies are not physically capable of doing each other much harm but males of gregarious species sometimes play "chicken." It's all wholesome sport for them; they're so light they wouldn't hurt each other if they did collide. (For some butterflies, colliding and falling together is a courtship game.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj8P1h8xu_g

Pretty to watch in slow motion, serville move fast in real life. A "butterfly tourist" in Ecuador described what sound like a newly eclosed generation "zooming up and down the road" in March:

https://www.neotropicalbutterflies.com/Site%20Revision/Pages/TripReports/TripReportMarch_april%202011%20ecuador.html

Most photos show this butterfly as white or yellowish with a few black stripes.

Photo by Pavlik, taken in October in Ecuador. Slowing that almost perpetual motion that makes Swallowtails a challenge to photograph, in interest in a scarred leaf, probably one that has recovered from damage by infant caterpillars...this one might be female.

In some lights, some individuals can look green.

Photo by Sid Dunkle, taken in February in Ecuador.

Slight but consistent differences have been observed between two subspecies, Eurytides serville acritus and E.s. serville: 

https://www.jungledragon.com/specie/22906/eurytides_serville.html

One mght expect that such a gregarious Kite would have lots of food plants. One might be right. Their natural or primary food plants may be Nectandra or Guatteria, which are favored by other Kites, but serville caterpillars reportedly can eat many kinds of leaves from the Rutaceae family, including rue itself, and also lime and orange and apparently some other citrus trees. There is a marked lack of scientific authority among the reports of exactly what, when, and how the caterpillars eat.

Adult butterflies feed on nectar from various plants including lantanas, thistles, and eupatoriums. They are said to have an odor humans notice and usually don't like, possibly in the burnt-sugar to dirty-sock range like the lantana flowers whose odor obviously doesn't put them off. 

No clear description of the early stages is available. One source says the caterpillars have colorful bands, but does not say which colors. 

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 Orabilis

This week's butterfly is Eurytides orabilis, a small Kite Swallowtail found in Central and South America. Because its white, yellow, green or cream-colored wings have wide black borders, with one wide black stripe down the underside and one stripe (in isocharis) or just a tab (in orabilis orabilis) of black down the upper wide of the forewings, it's sometimes called the Thick-Bordered Kite. E. dioxippus might be said to have a better claim on that name, since its borders are typically thicker, but calling orabilis the Colombian Kite doesn't make things much clearer as dioxippus is also found in Colonbia, and is more common. Orabilis seems always to have been rare.

The black border is even wider on the hind wings, covering the scalloped outer corners of the wings above the long black tails. The wingspan averages about two inches. Males and females look alike.

Photo by rtshaw80. This species has not been photographed as often as some Kites. Most web sites use photos of museum specimens, which fade to black and white although living butterflies can be vividly colored. The species was discovered only in 1872,

The name orabilis is a Latin word for "capable of being entreated," listed but not often used as a woman's name (sometimes thought to be the origin of the name Arabel). It is not to be confused with horribilis, "capable of causing horror, horrible." However, it's hard to see the relevance of either word to butterflies.

The basic E. orabilis is found in Costa Rica, Panama, and Guatemala. The subspecies E. orabilis isocharis is found in Colombia and Ecuador. 

Photo by Luis Miguel Constantino. The southern subspecies isocharis, "equal grace," has stripes both above and below on the forewings. 

As in many Swallowtail species, females eclose with a full load of eggs and may have to wait a few days for males to mature enough to mate. Young males hang out in groups near shallow water, drinking water from wet sand. Females flit around the edges of these "leks" from time to time, checking out the males, until males are ready to flit off with them. After mating, males fly high and wide, often above the treetops, while females fly around plants in the genus Guatteria, placing one egg on each chosen leaf. They may be found at any time of year. 

Although this species is listed among the attractions of some popular parks and preserves like the Piedras Blancas in Colombia, records of observations look like "1 sighting in July, 2 sightings in October," and so on. Most of the Kites are host-specific and cannot overpopulate, which makes them sparsely distributed when the population is stable at optimal levels. Good clear photos of orabilis are "rarities" because there can be a maximum of one caterpillar in a tree, and only a few of those caterpillars will become the butterflies who place a maximum of one egg in a tree for the next generation.

Photo by Hholbrook

Though not common, the species seems not to be threatened.

Eggs are said to resemble little white beads.

Caterpillars are described as grayish at first, maturing into green skins with black spots. They have the usual humpbacked look that conceals a yellow osmeterium

Digitalized sources didn't even offer a description of the pupa or the process of pupation. A generation of these butterflies may be three to four months long. Not much is positively known about them. There is room for scientists to add to the world's collection of knowledge.

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: Eurytides Leucaspis

Eurytides (or Protographium) leucaspis is a large Kite Swallowtail found in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. 

Photo by Lesly Espinoza.

Leucaspis means "white shield." The butterfly does not have a shield, or shield-shaped marking; if its central triangle or trapezoid were seen as a shield, it would still be green, yellow, or pale brown more often than white. Swallowtail species names were traditionally chosen in honor of heroes of literature. Leucaspis was a young war chief who challenged Hercules to fight. He lost, of course, because according to the story Hercules was the strongest man alive in his time. Leucaspis was considered heroic for daring to try. 

Leucaspis, the butterfly, fades dramatically. 

Bright new butterfly photographed by Karen Nichols.

Museum specimen from Wikipedia. 

These eye-catching Kites, with wingspans normally just under four inches and some of the longest "swallow tails" in South America, are poorly documented--usually by photographs of individuals at puddles:

Photo by Catalina Tong.

It is divided into two subspecies, E. or P. leucaspis leucaspis and E. or P. leucaspis lamidis (some sources show lamis), with just noticeably different arrangements of spots on the undersides of the wings. The forewings of lamidis may be "falcate"; those of leucaspis are more nearly straight-edged. These distinctions are not always obvious to non-specialists. Bodies are furry, sable above with yellow or tan stripes on the sides. Males' hind wings have scent folds in which the scales are modified into surprisingly long hairs.

For Kites these butterflies are gregarious. Male Swallowtails emerge from their chrysalides hours or days before they are ready to mate, and spend some time hanging out at puddles, sipping water that contains mineral salts. Some species favor clean water that absorbs a few minerals from the sand below. Some positively prefer polluted water. Female Swallowtails are pollinators; in many species males are composters. (Females usually get their mineral salts by contact with males.) Some Swallowtails form huge flocks at puddles. Kites, being monophagous, often look for large amounts of interpersonal distance and try to be the only Kite of their gender and species in a neighborhood. Leucaspis apparently does not share this craving for space.

Photo by Andreas Kay. Feasting on an oil-slicked puddle, these four butterflies crowd together so closely that their wings touch. In another photo, two more join them.

Female Swallowtails, who are usually ready to mate by the time they can fly, visit the puddles and often find mates there. After mating they spend most of their time looking for suitable places to lay their eggs, and are harder for humans to photograph or "collect" at puddles. Most photos of leucaspis online come from museums, and are of males collected at puddles.

The Kites, however, have tended to be poorly documented. (The Zebra Swallowtail is an exception. North America adores the exotic look of its one resident Kite species. Zebras have been heavily documented.) Though Naranjo and Restrepo rated leucaspis third on a list of butterflies that seemed interesting enough to be made "focal species" for the conservation message, leucaspis rated 28 points where two other Swallowtails (even bigger and showier) rated 30. As a result, Rothschild wrote more than a hundred years ago that the early life, even the female, of this species was unknown, and not much has been added to the world's knowledge since then. 

Photo by Nohely Reyes. Although subtler coloring often identifies female Swallowtails, nobody claims to know whether that's true for leucaspis, or whether this individual is female.

Butterfly of the Week: Yellow Kite

Is it critically endangered, or is it already extinct? Nobody's seen Brazil's rare Yellow Kite Swallowtail, Eurytides iphitas, in the last few years. 

Photo from lepidoptera.eu. Only males seem ever to have been collected or photographed, suggesting that the one distinguishing feature of this species, or subspecies, may be visible only in males.

One possibility about this rarity is that it may not be a true species. It looks just like Eurytides dolicaon but the long "tails" on its hind wings are only yellow-tipped, rather than mostly yellow. Neither species has been well enough studied to rule out the possibility that iphitas was just a mutation that has naturally bred itself out of the population, as mutations with no special function seem to do.

This possibility would, however, be embarrassing and discouraging to academic biologists, who have set up iphitas as "the type species for the genus" and have some emotional investment in believing it to be a distinct species. 

When collected specimens look this much alike, the basis for classifying them as distinct species is usually that dissected specimens showed internal structural differences. In butterflies the structural differences are often in the elaborate three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that is the butterfly's reproductive system. Insects' reproductive systems are built differently from birds' and mammals; it's possible to identify some structures that can be identified with counterparts in birds and mammals, but not possible to guess what other parts of the system are there for. Internal differences between butterflies of similar size and color can be enough to make crossbreeding impossible. Internal differences between male iphitas and dolicaon were found under a microscope, but whether they are enough to make crossbreeding impossible is not known. 

Iphitas. If-it-is. If-it-was. As a low-altitude Kite Swallowtail, attracted to brackish water, it lived on the Brazilian coast and was threatened by the development of properties near the beach. It may still live on parts of the coast that remain unoccupied by humans. The normal lifestyle of Kite Swallowtails is symbiotic with small trees in the custard-apple and laurel families. Nobody bothered to find out what iphitas ate. If the color mutation had something to do with its having adapted to eat a different kind of leaves, and its host plant was crowded out of existence, then iphitas may never be seen again.

"No time should be lost in locating and protecting its present haunts," advised the IUCN Red Book, but only one "haunt" for this species or subspecies was located. And for several years it's not been seen there. 

Butterfly of the Week: Eurytides Columbus

Eurytides columbus, the Colombian Kite or Columbus Kite, is one of those butterflies about whom a data search can be quite infuriating. Nobody knows very much about the Colombian Kite--why it lives in only a few parts of Colombia and Ecuador, what it lives on, whether it may become useful to humans, whether it is in fact a distinct species--except that it's rare, and so, knowing nothing about how fragile or robust a species it is, people will sell you dead bodies. Or they'll take your money and say they're sending you dead bodies. 

Hiss. Spit! Boxes of dead bodies aren't going to tell us anything Walter Rothschild didn't know in 1910. Why don't  these people show a little initiative and find out some facts about these butterflies' lives?

Photo by danielmesa1. 

Modern technology gives us better ways to study butterflies than pinning dead bodies in boxes. The good news is that some of the photos and videos that tell us what we know about columbus are free to enjoy on the Internet. Facts about this butterfly are harder to find than pictures of it are. Its picture has even appeared on postage, like this Liberian stamp:

Stamp and others in the same series for sale at solbery.com

As shown, it's small compared with some butterflies in the Swallowtail family, but larger than some other Kites; if the individual shown is sitting on an average man's hand its wingspread is about four inches. As with many Swallowtail species, colors vary, individuals tending to fade; newly eclosed Columbus Kites iridesce a fantastic mix of yellowish and bluish green with black stripes, older ones fade to black and white or brown and yellow. The body is black and furry; the eyes may reflect white or blue in some lights, and the antennae have bright yellow tips, curved backward like little golf clubs. The leading edge of the forewing has a decided curve, Overall, it looks different enough from the last few Kites we've seen to explain why some scientists think it belongs in a separate genus. 

Photo by vasquezaymer. 

The Columbus Kite fits within the tradition of naming Swallowtails after heroes. In fact this species received one of the more logical names in the "heroes" category; it lives in a country that was named after a hero of the country's history, and it shares that hero's name. Nevertheless, some question remained whether columbus should be classified as a completely distinct species, or as a subspecies, of the more widespread Eurytides serville. In any case, columbus and serville are in the minority of species in the genus Eurytides that nobody is trying to rename Protographium, or maybe Neographium. 

In Spanish the Kites are called Cometa, just as the kites people fly are called cometas. In English these long-tailed Swallowtail butterflies are sometimes called Swordtails, like the even longer-tailed Swordtails in the genus Graphium. 

Though rare, worldwide, they don't seem to be endangered; the norm for Kites is, after all, to live in symbiosis with one food plant, the total number of butterflies in the species alive at any given time fairly constant, dependent on the number of food plants. Most pollinate native fruit trees. Though each of these butterflies may turn out to be as important as the Zebra Swallowtail is to humans, they do live in countries where few people have felt able to afford to spend days watching butterflies. What a pity that sales for students' photographs and journals aren't as profitable as sales of the dead bodies the students probably know where to find.

This individual seeks out fresh, fast-moving water:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8L4RiJw5ls

This fresh water sipper seems to be consciously ignoring another columbus who approaches another Kite...of a different species? Is it E. serville? Can columbus and serville crossbreed?

https://twitter.com/indianacristo/status/1356039519653523463

Several photos show individual Columbus Kites sipping water in the company of many different smaller butterflies. Photos show one or two Columbus Kites, not a flock. I did find one photo that seemed to have caught three Columbus Kites in one frame--two close together, and a third keeping a good healthy distance. While a minority of large butterflies are gregarious, most seem to look for places where they can be the only one of their species and gender in the neighborhood. This helps make sure that their offspring have a good supply of food. 

Photographs document this species existing almost exclusively near water. Males and females look alike, but nearly all collected specimens have been male, raising the question whether females live mostly in the woods. (We've seen other Swallowtail species where the males spend most of their days in the sun and the females, after brief ventures out to find mates, spend their time in the woods, choosing host plants for their eggs.) These butterflies are well camouflaged to live in places dappled with shade and sunshine, like a grove of small trees near a stream. But none of the science sites ventures to name even a suspected host plant for Eurytides columbus.

New Book Review: Blue Morpho Butterfly

Title: Kids on Earth: Wildlife Adventures: Explore the World: Blue Morpho Butterfly: Costa Rica

Author: Sensei Paul David

Date: 2023

Publisher: Sensei Publishing

ISBN: 978-`077848-158-1

Quote: "The Blue Morpho butterfly is one of the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan of up to 8 inches."

To my taste, that's overdoing things, but some people like their butterflies large. 

This web site will focus on the Morphos in due time. They certainly have a beautiful range of colors--pale, cerulean, or indigo blue above, depending on how the light strikes them, and beige, brown, or blackish below--and a commanding presence. Swallowtails, Monarchs, and Diana Fritillaries catch the eye, but Morphos, which are similar in shape and color to Diana Fritillaries only more than twice the size, cannot be ignored. More than other butterflies they fail to fit into the category "bugs," as Americans dismissively call most insects, and remind us that they are animals--small and dumb, as animals go, but. Still.

It's a pleasure to be able to report that, when we look at Morphos, we'll see more about them than this book does. Of course, that's partly a difference of focus. Our "Butterfly of the Week" feature is for science students age ten to ninety, and this book seems to be for primary school students who like the idea of a book that counts lots of "chapters" consisting of a paragraph of text and a big glossy picture. Sensei Paul David counts this book as giving 30 fun facts about the Blue Morpho. I count three--it's big, it's fast, and it's a pollinator--and from that point the book drifts off into considering ways people use images of this butterfly in art. There are some live photos and some digital splices of butterfly photos into different kinds of backgrounds. Apart from postage stamps, and the Monarch-inspired dance costumes in California and Mexico, this web site has generally done little more than acknowledge that butterflies are often used in art. 

(Well, consider Zazzle. The photos of live butterflies in the "Save the Butterflies" Collection aren't unique, but they're a minority among the "butterfly" designs Zazzle prints. A majority are fancy sketches, hard to identify with any real species. Of identifiable butterfly images used on Zazzle, even though most of the designers and customers are in North America, the vast majority of the butterflies are Blue Morphos.)

This book has little to say about the lives of the giant butterflies designed to look camouflages against the sky, and won't satisfy a future biology major. It will delight future arts majors with its emphasis on images and symbolism. Any book with a photo of a Blue Morpho on every other page is guaranteed to be pretty, and this one is. Know your students. Sensei Paul David doesn't talk down to young readers, so teachers, grandparents, etc., can always tell the disappointed science majors they bought this book for their own pleasure. It's delicious eye candy.

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.