Reference photo of a pinned Graphium weiskei specimen, upper side

Reference photo

Photo: Yale Peabody Museum; photo by Aimee Burg 2011 · Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (via GBIF) · CC0 1.0 (cropped and resized). Not the specimen in Lucy’s drawer.

Tray 4 of 39

Graphium weiskei

(Ribbe, 1900)

Purple Spotted Swallowtail

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Your framed specimen is a different individual of the same species, chosen and mounted by Lucy.

  • Papilionidae
  • Butterfly
For young explorers

Its black wings have bright blue and purple spots.

This New Guinea swallowtail has black wings decorated with bright patches of blue and purple.

Catalog label
Family
Papilionidae
Subfamily
Papilioninae
Tribe
Leptocircini
Where it lives
New Guinea, Papua.

From the catalog of Lucy Garcia Salik, PhD. A mounted specimen from a licensed supplier.

Research notes

From published sources, not from Lucy’s catalog. Each note lists where it came from.

Description

The upper side of the wings is black, with patches in shades of green, blue, pink and purple. The markings are not the same on every butterfly. One museum paper reports that researchers who looked at many specimens from eastern Papua New Guinea found several distinct color forms among the males.

Where it lives

The sources say this butterfly lives only in New Guinea, and only in the island's high mountain country. They do not record it in lowland areas.

Habitat

It lives in the highlands and mountains of New Guinea. The sources describe it as a butterfly of upland areas but do not say anything more about its habitat.

Look-alikes

This butterfly is one of a small group of closely related swallowtails that look very much alike. The closest match is a relative found only on the Indonesian island of Seram. It has been treated as a separate species even though the two look so similar. Other members of the group live on islands to the west and east of New Guinea, in eastern Australia and in New Caledonia. A newer member described from the mountains of New Ireland can be told apart by its deep turquoise forewing markings and broader hindwings. Experts do not all agree on how to divide the group: one major species database lists that New Ireland butterfly as part of this species, not as a species of its own.

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