First Black Swallowtail Ecloses

The first of our 12 black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes asterius) pupae has eclosed.

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Well, this is a bit sooner than expected. One of our black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes asterius​) pupae has already eclosed today. Unlike the anise (Papilio zelicaon), the signs were quite obvious many days before it actually happened. First, the pupa got some "burnt" edges, or black dots, speckled across what appeared to be the pupal shell and then the actual internal portion just started getting blacker and blacker. The pharate pupa was crystal clear. 

The particular pupa that emerged today was quite a large one out the 12 and, as predicted, it was a female. The upper sides of the wings are a musty black color. You could tell that there was some sort of a nasty yellow undertone that it was trying to cover up.

Although we don't have any live zelicaon​'s to do a careful comparison with, it just seems that the wingspan on this one is relatively large for the size of the pupa it came out of. The legs and abdomen also seem rather long and skinny, proportionally. We expected that the vein lines forming the various dots and checkers of zelicaon would be identical on the polyxenes expect, of course, for the colors, but there are definitely some minor differences. For example, the blue parts on the front side is a lot more, the anal eyespot pupils are much smaller, and the abdomen pattern is completely a different thing. And, to throw it out there, the polyxenes doesn't look anywhere close to the model mimicry, Battus philenor, to the human eye when put side by side. It would probably be hard to tell in flight, though.

After this female emerged, we got excited about catching some zelicaon to try to attempt hybridizations. We actually caught a wild female zelicaon this morning, but it escaped after we tried to get it to lay eggs in our cage because there was a hole in it. We saw another female and a male in the afternoon in  Berkeley, but were unable to catch them with our broken net. Quite sad. For now, we have placed our zelicaon pupae into the incubator to see if they can catch up to some of the later polyxenes, but we will probably still have to keep trying to catch some wild ones if we actually want to get this hybridization thing going. Otherwise, we still intend on creating some pure lines of the polyxenes so that we can also compare the larval stages. 

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Authors
Brian Liang

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