DANAIDAE FROM SABAH, North Borneo ???

Thank You Adam I have not enough bibliography with good images ( D'Abrera, Ackery-van Wright ) to classify my Danaidae so I will disturb You again
alberto

Alberto,

Sorry I didn't reply last night, but my internet was down. Yes, those two do look like Parantica crowleyi (top) and luzonensis praemacaristus (bottom).

By the way, male hindwing androconia of these types of Danainae are important in determining the genus. In the original photo of 3 specimens each one belongs to a different genus. Tirumala has the most unusual androconia. Basically they consist of a pocket-like pouch with an opening on the upperside and the pouch lying flush with the hindwing underside, rather like looking at the inside of a pair of trousers with the pocket lying on top of the cloth. The androconia of Parantica comprise a velvety area near the anal angle of the hindwing, clearly visible in the luzonensis praemacaristus in your second photo.

I attached a photo from a book showing the strange pocket of the male Tirumala hindwing underside which I marked with a red line.




Adam.

Alberto,

Now you are asking questions in my own field. Yes, both of these specimens are macareus but Paranticopsis is not really a good genus, it is a mimetic group internal to the Pathysa section of what I call genus Graphium.

I assume by "Is it possible?" you are really asking about the data, and I am sure the lower specimen does not come from Borneo. The upper specimen is certainly ssp. macaristus from Borneo, but the lower one is from somewhere else, maybe W. Malaysia. It certainly looks like ssp. perakensis from the upperside.

Adam.

Hi Adam, the six on top come surely from Cocker Range, Sabah, captured by myself, the two bottom are labelled Kalimantan, the five in the second box are labelled North Borneo
I hope to be useful fot one time
alberto

Unfortunately there are no more data on the labels and they are quite old, so I do not remember the supplier
alberto

Both of these are forms of the same subspecies, Papilio castor mehala - one is rather like castor castor from India with an incomplete postdiscal band on the hindwing, and the other is more like castor mahadeva from further south in Tenasserim, Thailand and much of Laos. Note that the white patches in the hindwing band of mahadeva are approximately equal in length rather than distinctly narrowing towards the anal angle. In my paper on Papilionidae of Laos (published in early 2007) I assigned the population of Papilio castor from Luang Nam Tha, NW Laos to subspecies mehala because males similarly have two forms (with intermediates), but after visiting Luang Nam Tha in 2008 I realised that the females are completely different from mehala, and that population actually belongs to subspecies kanlanpanus, which was described from S. Yunnan, not far away.

Here is a photo of my series of mehala showing the variation:



The old specimen at the top is from 'Karen Hills', which is not very far south from Kalaw.

and a typical example of the female photographed in BMNH:



And here are my kanlanpanus from Luang Nam Tha:



You can see the males of the two subspecies look superficially similar, but females are very different.

Adam.