Celebrating the Fourth of July With Tons of Hand-paired Anise Swallowtails

Now that our two largest stocks of Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon) chysalises are eclosing, we have begun hand-pairing them like crazy!

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Over the past few days we have had a huge number of Anise Swallowtails (Papilio zelicaon) eclose from two large stocks of chrysalises that were produced a few weeks ago by two lineages of caterpillars. One group was from four hand-paired females back in May, and the others were wild caught eggs that we collected from our front yard fennel at roughly the same time as the hand-pair produced ones. Now that all the chrysalises from these two groups are eclosing, there are swarms of butterflies flying around in the chrysalis tubs. We counted approximately 70 or so thus far and plenty more will emerge later this week. This is probably the largest eclosion of Anise Swallowtails we have ever had.

For the past days we have simply kept the eclosed butterflies inside the tubs but today we decided to do some massive hand-pairing between the two groups since most males in there should be a few days old now (spermatozoa count is low for the first 48 hours after the male ecloses). We took the oldest looking males of one group and paired it with the biggest females we could find in the other group, thus out breeding the two groups of lineages. In total we got eleven pairings today. All eleven females were placed on a potted fennel plant surrounding by a mesh laundry bag, but we accidentally had one escape when we tried to get in inside the enclosure. So far most have already begun laying eggs, though today was not very hot or sunny so there was probably less opposition than there could have been. Hopefully we will get a hefty stock of successfully fertilized eggs in the coming week, not to mention more hand-pairings as well!

- Alan