Subspecies of Papilio machaon

[Leonardo]

Feb 3, 2021 11:01:35 GMT Adam Cotton said:

Sturm's book basically contains many plates with photos of specimens and brief text listing the subspecies. I assisted him, editing the text and checking spellings, dates etc, but I left subspecies decisions to him after giving advice.

There aren't really any modern publications with text describing the characters to differentiate each subspecies, I suppose the most modern are the works of Seyer between 1974 and 1992 (major papers in 1974 and 1976), but those are rather hard to obtain and were written in German.

Adam.

Ok, thanks Adam.
It seems to me, therefore, that the Sturm's book allows, through the examination of the tables to differentiate the main subspecies.
Thank you very much for your help, I think I will buy it, also because even if find the Seyer's works, I cannot read the German.

[Adam Cotton]

Sturm synonymised several subspecies together, more than I would actually agree with myself, which is why I stated above that 'I left subspecies decisions to him after giving advice'. I did tell him that some subspecies were definitely synonyms and corrected errors where he incorrectly applied ssp. names in his draft list, but I didn't want to impose my own opinion on his work.

With regard to the characters separating subspecies you should bear in mind that the various generations of the same machaon ssp. often look very different. Also the summer generation of the same ssp. in warmer areas is more yellow than from cooler places, and this can vary depending on the weather during the larval and early pupal stage of that generation. In a cool year the summer generation from the same place will be darker than those from a warm year. This is more obvious in specimens of the same ssp. from significantly different altitudes, such as lower and higher elevation summer generation ssp. centralis from Kirghizstan and Tadjikistan.

Adam.

[Leonardo]

Feb 4, 2021 11:04:36 GMT Adam Cotton said:

Sturm synonymised several subspecies together, more than I would actually agree with myself, which is why I stated above that 'I left subspecies decisions to him after giving advice'. I did tell him that some subspecies were definitely synonyms and corrected errors where he incorrectly applied ssp. names in his draft list, but I didn't want to impose my own opinion on his work.

With regard to the characters separating subspecies you should bear in mind that the various generations of the same machaon ssp. often look very different. Also the summer generation of the same ssp. in warmer areas is more yellow than from cooler places, and this can vary depending on the weather during the larval and early pupal stage of that generation. In a cool year the summer generation from the same place will be darker than those from a warm year. This is more obvious in specimens of the same ssp. from significantly different altitudes, such as lower and higher elevation summer generation ssp. centralis from Kirghizstan and Tadjikistan.

Adam.

Ok Adam, thank you very much for your clarifications.
I too with my little experience and knowledge I have been able to verify how the climatic conditions (temperature) sometimes have an important influence on the color tone (for example in some nymphalids).
In the end, however, can you confirm to me that using the plates in the Sturm's, at least the main subspecies of papilio machaon can be distinguished, regardless of the generation or the particular microclimate of the area?

[Adam Cotton]

There are 15 plates illustrating machaon (a couple of those plates are aberrations) out of a total of 32 plates in the book. Most plates illustrate 12 specimens, so there are a lot of different specimens pictured in this book. Each specimen has place of capture but not date, so it isn't possible to know which generation a particular specimen belongs to.

My main taxonomic disagreement is that Sturm treats all European machaon as a single subspecies machaon, including the various populations from Western Russia and the Middle East but he does separate the Maltese population and britannicus. He includes gorganus, hispanicus, sphyrus, syriacus etc, and even orientis, in ssp. machaon. In my opinion many of the populations are worthy of separation as subspecies.

Sturm does state characteristics for each subspecies that he treats as separate, so that will certainly be useful for you.

Adam.

[Leonardo]

ok, thanks for the details.
what you say is very useful to me.
I cannot start from a book that does not distinguish the various European subspecies.
In fact, I would like to begin to study precisely from those.......

[Adam Cotton]

Here are drawer photos from my collection, sorry about the poor quality.

[Adam Cotton]

[Adam Cotton]

[Adam Cotton]

[Adam Cotton]

Japan:

[Adam Cotton]

[Leonardo]

congratulations on your collection,
truly splendid and complete

[xavm (Xavier)]

Wow !

[satyrinae]

Adam, WOW is an understatement. Glad that you have a nice series from Malta :-)