Lepidoptera Hybrids

The main purpose of my 'hybridizing' was to test the DNA results which show hippocrates, machaon and brevicauda are all the same species. Last year I continued breeding with the 'hybrids' and found it was easy to breed the male black form with females of hippocrates (I did it for 3 generations up to (((b x m) x h) x h) x h and got many offspring from these crosses. However I found it much harder to make F2 [((b x m) x h) x h] x [((b x m) x h) x h] and [(((b x m) x h) x h) x h] x [(((b x m) x h) x h) x h] 'hybrids'. The dark females mated with dark males did lay fertile eggs, but generally in low numbers, and few survived. I think this was partly due to reduced fertility but actually mainly due to the unfavourable weather here at that time of year (rainy season, not much sun and high humidity). I am currently remaking the cross [(((b x m) x h) x h) x h] x [(((b x m) x h) x h) x h] with pupae that I put in diapause last December and brought out of the fridge recently. The 2nd and 3rd generation 'hybrids' are amazing, some very large compared with European machaon, never mind brevicauda.

I also made 'hybrids' (both ways) between European machaon and hippocrates, and found that the cross with machaon as male produced offspring that were much easier to breed to F2 than the reciprocal using male hippocrates.

One interesting result of crossing brevicauda and machaon was that the male offspring nearly all emerged quite soon, whereas all the female offspring went into diapause, and a few emerged late in the year but most of them are emerging now. Today I crossed a female (b x m) with hippocrates male and another with melitensis male and I also crossed a female brevicauda with hippocrates male. It will be interesting to see if these females lay many fertile eggs or not, as I have also found that brevicauda females are much more difficult to induce to lay eggs that either hippocrates or machaon, so it is possibly not a fertility problem causing the 'hybrid' females to lay few eggs, but may actually be environmental.

My current opinion based on the work I have been doing is that brevicauda, hippocrates and machaon are the same species at the moment, but are probably diverging to such an extent that in a significant period of time they will have become separate species. Interestingly one of the best foodplants for hippocrates, Cryptotaenia japonica, is no good for rearing European machaon, larvae all die on it.

I am doing several other crosses as well, and it's just the beginning of the season here now, so it's going to be another interesting year.

Adam.

Hybrid male. Papilio maackii maackii “Japan “ x Papilio machaon gorganus “Ukraine “

Thanks for your pic radusho.let us know how the offspring will look like!

here's another picture of a freshly hatched hybrid male.this time maackii maackii x dehaanii dehaanii.

I've fooled around with some hybrid Saturnids over the last few years. The attached photo is of a male, A. dubernardi x A luna that I reared last year on White pine. I did get some females as well. They were small and carried no ovae.

Other pairings that produced hybrid progeny were C. regalis x C. splendens, A. zephyria x A. cecrops p. and H. cecropia x H. columbia. The Citheronia and Automeris pairings produced fully fertile hybrid offspring and in both cases the hybrid lines were continued for another generation or two.

Female hybrid Papilio machaon gorganus “Ukraine“ x Papilio polyxenes stabilis “Costa Rica“

The F1 machaon x polyxenes are all dark like polyxenes, as the dark gene is dominant. It is only in the F2 generation and beyond where you will get both machaon-like and polyxenes-like specimens.

It is interesting to see the intermediates in Felix's F2 cross.

Adam.