These beautiful butterflies are likely to be found in the sort of
situations where the food plants of the larvae are growing. Open
groves, the borders of woods, and the margins of streams or marshes
are the places where one is most likely to find spice bush and
sassafras. These are the places to look for these butterflies which
one may often see in graceful flight near the ground, pausing now and
then to seek a sassafras leaf or to sip the nectar from a flower.
=The Tiger Swallowtail=
_Papilio glaucus_
One of the many things that make a study of the life-histories of
butterflies of great interest is the variations in the development of
many of the species. One who follows the simplest life-story of a
butterfly and sees the egg change to larva and the larva change in
size and form and color with each successive moult and then change
again into the seemingly inert chrysalis, from which there finally
comes the winged butterfly--unlike the egg, unlike the larva, unlike
the chrysalis--a creature of perfect beauty, wonderfully adapted to
living freely in the air and sipping ambrosial nectar from the
flowers--one who follows these changes with awakened vision can
scarcely fail to have a sense of wonder as to the laws that govern
such intricate phenomena. But the marvel is still more pronounced in
the case of those butterflies which have two or more forms arising
from the same lot of eggs in a way which science has as yet not
adequately explained.
The splendid Tiger Swallowtail is an example of this dimorphism which
is of especial interest because of the fact that the extra form is
confined to one sex and to only a part of the geographical area over
which the butterfly is found. The species occurs over a very large
part of the North American continent, being found from ocean to ocean
and from Canada to Florida. In the region north of approximately the
fortieth degree of latitude there is but one form of the insect--the
familiar yellow-and-black striped butterfly which every one has seen
visiting the lilac blossoms in May or June. South of this, however,
part of the females take on an entirely different appearance, being
almost wholly black with the hind wings touched with lines of blue and
bordered with crescents of yellow and orange. The curious thing about
it is that a certain mother butterfly may lay a dozen eggs part of
which will develop into the usual yellow form and the rest into the
black form, both lots being of the same sex. This black form is so
entirely distinct in appearance that the two were originally described
as separate species, and they were long considered such, until
breeding experiments determined the precise condition. (_See plate,
page 17._)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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