Papilio machaon aliaska

[Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX]

A piece of speculation (in refereed journals) that I seem to recall seeing
more than once is that butterfly 'x' moved to North America from
Europe/Asia. I think I have even seen the reverse musing, where species 'y'
is alleged to have moved onto Asia from North America. I find it interesting
that there seems to be little or no consideration of the possibility that
Beringia itself may have created some species that are different from other
similar looking Asian and North American species. So rather than thinking in
terms of Asian/NA species we should keep an open mind to a more complex
situation such as Asian/NA/Beringian species. What also interests me is the
apparent inconsistency in the way that different butterflies are treated
with respect to same or different species on the two continents. I have no
magic answers but like many people have lotsa questions and some thoughts
that differ from the thoughts of other people. Do the Asian 'machaon' only
hilltop on mountain tops ?? or do they breed there as well. Here in North
America we have butterflies that breed in the alpine tundra areas and
hilltop there as well (taxon aliaska). We also have butterflies that breed
in low elevation muskegs but also hilltop (taxon hudsonianus). I wonder how
many specimens of hudsonianus exist in collections under the name of aliaska
just because they were collected on a mountain top and all the literature
says that butterlfies on mountain tops must be aliaska :-) In my view the
situation is not nearly as neat and clear as some literature makes it out to
be.  If this was a neat and clear situation there would not be all these
different views and such a rich body of literature on the topic; it would
have been put to bed many years ago. Is there someone on these lists that
can educate us about Beringia and how it may or may not have factored into
the evolution of species/subspecies/whatever ???

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaakko Kullberg [mailto:jaakko.kullberg at helsinki.fi]
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 12:48 PM
To: leps-l at lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Papilio machaon aliaska


Well, yeah it is great that few P. machaon females e.g. in Sahara and Alaska
laid eggs with different kind of  surface. So is the human skin somewhat
different here and there...

I wonder how anybody can think that such very mobile insect as P. machaon
would be happily different species in the palearctic and nearctic sides. P.
machaon is atleast on our side of Beringia a total bullshit species
hilltopping in numbers in every mountain top and you can be sure that P.
machaon migrates yearly to Alaska - so you can add back in the list. Of
course there can be more species included somewhere, but the mentioned egg
story in the unrefereed (?) series (published by Eitschberger) is not the
best way to do the thing. P. alexanor and hospiton are good old species,
saharae I don't know - atleast the latter is very similar to machaon.

With "holy anger",
jaska

BTW: Of course there is 100% Papilio machaon from Alaska in our collection -
now it is again reported from N.A. :-)



 
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