Sv: Sommarplåga i macro
Tyvärr Stig bilden är tagen i England. Dålig på deras fjärilar.
Lite vilseledda här. Jag brukar kunna artbestämma europeiska dagfjärilsarter med den litteratur jag har, men här gick jag vilse och har rådfrågat en brittisk kompis som är professor emeritus i zoologi (och vilken tillsammans med sin hustru som är disputerad botaniker är ett mycket framgångsrikt team i mina biologiska bildgåtetävlingar) och han kommer en bra bit på väg trots att vi inte vet ens från vilken värdsdel denna fjäril härstammar.
Se här vad han svarar:
"Dear Åke
I'll do my best, but that's not much: firstly this is NOT a native European species, let alone a British one. Britain (like Sweden) is on the edge of Europe so each of our countries has only a subset of the not-very-rich European butterfly fauna.
My bet is that your friend photographed this in a collection of exotic butterflies, probably in a glasshouse (to stop them all blowing or flying away). There are quite a number of places in this country (& I guess also in Sweden?) who use butterflies as an attraction. The butterfly in your friend's pic is on what I think is a Lantana plant, species of which are native to S & central America, and they are classic "butterfly planst" with nectar-rich flowers: hence butterfly houses use them to keep their charges well fed & happy. Lantana is also tough as nails and grows almost anywhere, so also ideal!
There's a small industry in the tropics exporting pretty butterflies at the pupal stage, when they are easy to contain and fly to market, ready to emerge in an exhibitor's butterfly house. For example, I used to take students to the Arabuko-Sokoke forest on the Kenyan coast, the last remaining extensive patch of lowland coastal forest which (despite the tiny area, only 44 sq km) had an amazing selection of animals found almost nowhere else. One of the ways the conservationists were trying to give local people an interest in forest conservation was by encouraging a butterfly-farming trade: locals could collect butterfly caterpillars from the forest and rear them until they pupated. It was a good idea, especially as the locals could do this with a little training and almost no money-investment, and it really did give some local families a useful extra income. The trouble was a real practical problem: the market for butterfly pupae is apparently very volatile, almost on a month by month basis, so sometimes someone would bring his pupae in to the office and be told "We can not sell these just now, so we can't buy them from you".
So this butterfly could come from almost anywhere, but probably tropical/subtropical because that's where there is greatest butterfly diversity and also most poor people needing some additional cash. Consequently, recognising the species depends on an enormous knowledge base or just happening to know the right bit of it. Insects/ butterflies aren't my specialism, so the best I can do is suggest it may be a species in the family Papilionidae ("Swallowtails" though by no means all have streamers on their hindwings). I've leafed through a couple of books with pics of butterflies from around the world but could not find anything that matches the picture.
So you see that this is really a rather roundabout way of saying "I don't know". Sorry. His best chance was to have got someone where he saw the butterfly to tell him what it was; otherwise find some real butterfly enthusiast.
For me however, it was a fun problem, and made me look through again a lovely book I have on butterfly biology: it is some while since I read Sbordoni & Forestiero's "Butterflies of the World", and I had forgotten just how much fascinating information there is there. Many people have used butterflies as subjects to study wider biological questions (for example, mechanisms of natural selection, mimicry systems, etc) so the book has a more general interest than just describing the variety of butterflies themselves."
Längre kommer vi inte utan mer information om ursprungslokal. Och dessutom bör vi akta oss för biologiska bildgåtor, sista gången jag publicerade en biologisk bildgåtetävling här i forum så blev jag utsatt för en del hånfulla kommentarer, något som endast till del kompenserades av att några medlemmar deltog med entusiasm.
aake
