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Post by cabintom on Nov 18, 2016 5:20:40 GMT
why are zoroastres and echerioides put together ? aren't different species ? I haven't dug into that particular problem. Some have zoroastres as a subspecies of echerioides, others have them as separate species. At ABRI, currently they have " nioka" as a subspecies of zoroastres.
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Post by cabintom on Nov 18, 2016 6:37:43 GMT
mcheki I've caught a single female of P. plagiatus in the forest near here, about 25-50km from where I caught the nioka (savanna biotope). That female is the only specimen of the species from DRC in the ABRI collection. Also, in the 40 years R. Ducarme has collected in the region, he hasn't found any plagiatus... it's not at all common in Ituri/N. Kivu. I've thought that perhaps these nioka are found in some sort of hybridization zone... but either species that would be involved are fairly rare here, so I'm not sure that that makes sense.
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Post by africaone on Nov 18, 2016 8:18:44 GMT
why are zoroastres and echerioides put together ? aren't different species ? I haven't dug into that particular problem. Some have zoroastres as a subspecies of echerioides, others have them as separate species. At ABRI, currently they have " nioka" as a subspecies of zoroastres. African papilio are definitely so well known
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Post by Adam Cotton on Nov 18, 2016 16:01:30 GMT
Thierry sarcastically said
"African papilio are definitely so well known"
and he is so right. Never mind the several species/subspecies questions, we don't actually know yet how many of the species groups are related to each other. There is a plan to do the DNA of African Papilio.
mcheki said
"I am convinced the two species are separate".
I would be very interested to hear why you say that. I am not being sceptical, but your knowledge and experience will be very helpful.
Adam.
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Post by mcheki on Nov 20, 2016 11:24:48 GMT
Let me try to explain my thinking. Different authors, over the years, have differing thoughts and ideas on the determination of the two groups. Several papers have been publishes as a result. As I obtained these and considering the chronology of the publishing I built up a checklist of Papilionidae. Below is the section containing P echerioides and P zoroastres as it stands now in my list **. This basically shows species, subspecies and some forms against an abbreviated distribution. The numbers refer to my collection, which as can be seen is not complete with all subspecies. Many years ago I was looking at P dardanus specimens while reading through Bernardi, Pierre and Nguyen “Le polymorphisme et le mimetisme de Papilio dardanus Brown” Bull. Soc. Ent. de France, 1985. and this mentioned that some dardanus forms were fluorescent and others were not. On checking, in an incidental and exploratory way, other groups of Papilionidae I noticed that echerioides and zotroastres differed in their reaction to UV light. I was using a small long wave 366nm lamp. This difference applies to all the subspecies I have. It only applies to the males. Basically P echerioides males fluoresce under UV light and P zoroastres males do not. I have tried to show this by taking photos yesterday. Not the best but I hope it shows what I am saying. First pictures are of P echerioides leucospilos on the left and P zoroastres joiceyi on the right.
** So far I have been unable to copy and paste this table into this post I will try again later.
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Post by mcheki on Nov 20, 2016 11:29:55 GMT
The second double picture shows P echerioides oscari on the left and a male P zoroastres zoroastres on the right.
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Post by mcheki on Nov 20, 2016 11:31:19 GMT
Finally a picture of the whole drawer to help get the previous pictures into perspective. If looking at a series of each species this slight pigment difference can just be appreciated by the human eye.
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Post by africaone on Nov 20, 2016 14:15:28 GMT
Nothing to say, except amazing and ... congratulations .... This can be a subject for a paper .... in ENT afr. of course ...
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Post by Paul K on Nov 20, 2016 15:36:35 GMT
It is indeed very interesting way to determinate species. I am sure that this could be use in other cases also.
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Post by Adam Cotton on Nov 20, 2016 17:17:11 GMT
That is a very interesting character indeed, thank you very much for showing us here. I can see the colour difference between the two in the draw too, zoroastres is a much more pure white whereas echerioides is cream.
Do you know if there is anywhere where the two species are sympatric? Part of the argument for uniting them seems to be allopatry. (For any readers who are uncertain, sympatry is where two taxa occur in the same place and allopatry is where they never occur together.)
If you can't paste the table into the text window in the forum then the next best thing would be to convert it to a jpeg and post it as a photo.
Adam.
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Post by mcheki on Nov 20, 2016 19:12:48 GMT
Off the top of my head I can not think of anywhere the two species can be found together. Here is the missing table as I see the situation at the moment. (eventually photographed a print out!). See some explanatory notes in first post on this subject.
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Post by africaone on Nov 20, 2016 19:31:14 GMT
that makes sense. It is a typical western vs eastern distribution linked to highland forest.
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Post by Adam Cotton on Nov 20, 2016 21:11:35 GMT
that makes sense. It is a typical western vs eastern distribution linked to highland forest. So neither of these taxa occur in lowlands at all? How close do they actually get to each other? This is a really interesting discussion and shows how important the knowledge that ICF members have acquired while COLLECTING butterflies actually is to the study of these species. Adam.
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