First Papilio rutulus Female Ecloses, Fails Miserably

The first of our two female western tiger swallowtails (Papilio rutulus) eclosed today but it failed to expand its wings.

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This entire day we had been waiting in anticipation for the first of our two western tiger swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) females to eclose. In fact, just two days ago we had managed to capture, with quite some degree of luck, a very large and healthy wild male at Albany Hill in order to hand-pair. Trying to get the female to eclose as soon as possible as not to have to keep the male in captivity for too long and because we are to get our wisdom teeth extracted in two days and don't want to deal with setting things up at that time, we had put the chrysalis into the incubator. 

By the time we returned home today from gathering leaves, the butterfly had already broken the front portion of the pupal shell and had crawled up the side of the incubator. This is not supposed to happen. A butterfly that is ready to emerge should have to trouble at all getting out of the shell. Immediately alarmed, we tried to see whether the butterfly had emerged on accident, perhaps due to excessive handling before or the unnatural conditions of the incubator, but apparently it had not. It had legitimately tried to emerge but had trouble breaking the back of the pupal cuticle based on the fact that it seemed to have attempted to expand its wings within it; the wings looked slightly stretched and were completely dry when the cuticle was removed. In addition, it had no trouble connecting the pieces of its proboscis, which is something that only occurs when the wings expand. 

Of all of the pupae we have that could have failed to eclose, this was a pretty tragic choice. We tried to make the best of the situation, but the crippled female was basically unworkable because its abdomen was completely soaked in dried meconium that it released while the shell was still stuck. The abdomen was weak and flabby and was not firm like a strong butterfly should be. We were very surprised that the hand-pairing still seemed to turn out okay.

After the hand-pairing we cut the crippled wings because they are useless and only serve as a handicap. We got a plastic tub and put in some willow (Salix) cuttings and stuck the female inside. We plan on putting the tub in the incubator to try to get some activity going. After all, we have seen very beat up female swallowtails  that also can't fly lay eggs before. We just hope that this crippled rutulus female doesn't die out of weakness before it even has a chance. The good thing is that we still have one more female chrysalis that should emerge within a week. 

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Authors
Brian Liang

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