Eurytides agesilaus? Peru, Tingo Maria

It's Protographium agesilaus autosilaus (missing both tails).

Bob

Bob,

I have to disagree here, as I cannot see that Protographium leosthenes from Australia can possibly be congeneric with Eurytides species at all. Brown (1991) proposed this based on characters that are probably plesiomorphic rather than derived (in other words the characters are primitive rather than advanced - such characters cannot infer close relationship). Of course, Keith Brown could be right, but I am currently of the opinion that it is likey that he misinterpreted the character states.
Simonsen et al. (2011) despite not analysing leosthenes itself showed that the New World Eurytides are a close group. Such so called genera as Mimoides, Protesilaus etc are at most worthy of subgeneric status within genus Eurytides.

Eurytides still needs detailed analysis with a wide range of taxa included (and Australian leosthenes as well as other Leptocircini) as the relationships between the different species groups within Eurytides are still unclear. Mind you, Asian and African Graphium is even more of an enigma despite some preliminary DNA work by the Japanese.

Adam.

Bob,

I am glad you are not arguing, however if you or anyone else has evidence to counter anything I may write I will always be delighted to hear about it. We all learn from each other on here.

Yes, Tyler et al. 1994 is actually an excellent book (except for lack of ease of use) as long as you bear in mind that many of the taxonomic opinions are questionable.

Some of the species lumping is dubious (such as treating glaucus and rutulus as conspecific, and zelicaon with polyxenes), whereas other treatments at the species level seem likely (victorinus in menatius; oregonia, bairdii, joanae and brevicauda in machaon) and DNA evidence certainly backs up the machaon grouping. Their treatment of all the zagreus group taxa as a single species remains to be proven or not, and hopefully the DNA of these will be looked at soon.

However, at the same time as lumping many species they (Keith Brown in reality) have split many genera, probably very much a case of oversplitting, as suggested by the study of Zakharov et al. (2004) on Papilio, which was unable to find any good reason to treat the groups within Papilio (s. l.) as separate genera (I have previously discussed these findings at some length elsewhere on Insectnet).

Personally I strongly believe that the genus name has an important function indicating to non-experts which species are actually related to each other. Splitting at the genus level actually hides innate relationships and thus deprives non-taxonomist end users (ecologists, other biologists, collectors etc etc) of useful information.

Anyway, I would recommend Tyler et al. as the best treatment of Papilionidae of the New World, but at the same time bear in mind that our knowledge has been much enhanced since 1994, particularly with the advent of DNA analysis (although I would not recommend relying solely on DNA evidence to solve all taxonomic problems).

Adam.