InsectNet forum

Finally the long awaited work on the Papilio machaon group has been published at the end of August.

Guide to the Butterflies of the Palearctic Region
Papilionidae part. IV - Tribe Papilionini, Genus Papilio (partim)
Authors: V. Nazari, A.M. Cotton, J.G. Coutsis, N. Shapoval, V. Todisco, G.C. Bozano




This book covers the following species:
Papilio machaon, P. saharae, P. everesti, P. hospiton, P. verityi, P. archias, P. hippocrates, P. xuthus, P. demoleus & P. alexanor.
The remaining Palearctic species in the genus will be covered in part V, which is being prepared now.

See
https://www.omnesartes.com/en/books-gui ... nae-v.html
for ordering details direct from the publishers (also available now or soon from other entomological booksellers).

Adam.

PS. Just to clarify, as an author I do not receive any income from sales of this book.

Note, this book does not cover machaon group taxa from the American continent, except for those which also occur in the Palearctic.

Adam.

Thanks Adam.

This group is of great interest to me, but I've had to put off study until the next life. Still I'd love to read the book.

Anyone know of a US source yet?

One of the authors, V. Nazari, works at the CNC in Ottawa. He actually gave me a tour of their collection a few years ago when I visited. If all else fails, you can probably email him and he could probably tell you how to get the book in NA.

Great book - just arrived. Good addition to series. I like simplified subspecies tree with machaon - especially many southeuropean ssp were ridiculous, also alexanor merging is probably justifiable. To be true I am little surprised that ssp.sylvina from Taiwan remains only subspecies, it is rather different and many taiwaneese butterflies have species status. Also differences between verityi and archias are rather subtle, maybe inside machaon range we will find bigger ones. But have no clue about DNA work, probably DNA will support authors decision.

Jan

Jan,

Thank you for your vote of approval. Yes, the subspecies classification of Papilio machaon does seem much better. Some authors wanted to include almost all European populations in ssp. machaon, but I persuaded them to keep three main subspecies (plus britannicus and sphyrus). We managed to work out the problems across southern Europe, through Turkey to Iran by including the Iranian populations in ssp. centralis and everything to the west in ssp. aestivus (syriacus is a junior synonym of that name).

Unfortunately ssp. sylvina from Taiwan has not been seen since the earthquake of 1999 when there were serious landslides in the montane habitat where the foodplant grew (thanks to Prof. Hsu for this information). As a result we were not able to examine fresh specimens. Vazrick Nazari originally wanted to include sylvina in P. hippocrates, but since we were unable to provide any evidence we decided to retain it in P. machaon.

P. archias does look similar to P. verityi, and we were originally going to include it as a subspecies of the latter, however Nazar Shapoval found that the DNA of archias is very different to both P. machaon and P. verityi so we separated it at species level. Note there is usually a thin black edge below the red anal eye spot in archias, whereas verityi normally has no black below the eye spot. Also there are differences in tail length (the tails of verityi are much longer) and in the black shading near the anal margin of the hindwing.

Adam.

eurytides wrote: ↑Mon Sep 18, 2023 10:42 pm One of the authors, V. Nazari, works at the CNC in Ottawa.

Vazrick Nazari is now affiliated to an Italian institution. I don't know if he also retains his position in Ottawa or not.

Adam.

From his personal website:

From 2011 to 2019 he was an assistant curator of entomology at the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes. Since 2019 he is a wildlife research and management consultant for the private sector in Ottawa, Canada. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 scientific papers and several books in the fields of insect taxonomy, cultural entomology, and molecular phylogenetics of butterflies and moths.

His Italian institutional affiliation (University of Padova) is very recent.

Adam.

Yes Adam, he does mention on his website “Postdoctoral fellow, Dipartimento di Biologia, Università Degli Studi di Padova, Italy.” My previous post was just to show that he is no longer working at the CNC in Ottawa.