Attempting to Get Eggs From Pipevine and Eastern Tiger Swallowtails

We attempt to get our hand-paired pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor hirsuta) and eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) feamles to oviposit.

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Recently, we've had quite a few of our pipevine and eastern tiger swallowtails eclose. We managed to hand-pair one of our pipevine females with a male quite easily a few days ago. However, we only had female glaucus, so we resorted to hand-pairing one of the female glaucus with a wild caught male rutulus. This hybrid pairing is unlikely to work (though according to studies the reciprocal pairing with a male glaucus and female rutulus sometimes does), but it's the best we an do for now.

Anyway, we decided to set up an indoor oviposition box with a heat lamps since it is not sunny or hot enough outside at this time of year for them to oviposit in an outside cage. The box we set up is quite small, about the size of a shoe box, with a screen lid. The heat lamps are right on top and are the kind sold at pet shops for reptiles. The heat generated by the lamps is not considered very strong, though warm enough for our purposes (maybe heat the box up to about 21-27°C). Inside the box, we placed dishes of water covered by screen for the butterflies to drink and to prevent the box from becoming overly dry. On top, we placed either plum (Prunus cerasifera) branches or pipevine (Aristolochia californica) cuttings depending on which butterfly was inside.

We switched on the lamps for the whole day and put the butterflies one at a time to try to induce them to oviposit on the plants, but so far neither has. The pipevine swallowtail seemed to react when coming in contact with the host, drumming its feet all over the plant and occasionally curling its abdomen as if ready to oviposit, but never did. The glaucus, however, did not seem to respond at all when on the plum. Glaucus prefer tulip tree (Liriodendron) as their host over Prunus, and they would never encounter the species of Prunus we have anyway, so it's not surprising that our glaucus did not respond to it. We'll keep trying over the next few days anyway just in case there is a chance the butterflies will begin to lay eggs. 

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​Authors
Alan Liang

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