Principios de Taxonomia

5.19 The Mimicry Morphs of the Female Swallowtails of the Genus Papilioj123
advantage of being amenable to cities, which are rich in food and safety, has led to
significant changes in allelic frequency distributions in several bird species in the
course of only a few generations.
5.19
The Mimicry Morphs of the Female Swallowtails of the Genus Papilio
Intraspecific morphs were of particular concern to taxonomists when it came to
changing taxonomy from a purely trait-oriented grouping process to one that was
more scientific. More than one hundred years ago, Edward Bagnall Poulton recognized
the inconsistency and contradictory nature of a species concept based only on
traits. The importance of his classical publications What is a species? and The
conception of species as interbreeding communities, published in 1904 and 1938 in
the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London and the Proceedings of
the Linnaean Society of London respectively (see Mallet, 2004), can hardly be
underestimated. These publications stripped the Linnaean typology from its scientific
foundation and exposed the classification by traits to be a subjective grouping
according to our own pragmatic objectives and trait assessments, that is, that species
were, as Darwin said in 1859, made for our convenience (Darwin, 1859). Moreover,
Poulton anticipated Ernst Mayr s essential lines of thought by decades, proposing the
fundamental concept of the species as a reproductive community.
Poulton had been influenced by the observations by Alfred Russel Wallace and
Henry Walter Bates of mimicry morphs in butterflies (Mallet, 2004). Bates primarily
investigated South American Heliconiids, whereas Wallace discovered the fascinating
mimicry morphs of the Southeast Asian Swallowtails Papilio memnon, P. polytes
and P. aegeus. There are several different morphs among the females of these
butterfly species. In contrast, there are no morphs among the males, which have
uniform shapes. The different female morphs mimic butterfly species of entirely
different families, which are inedible to birds. The caterpillars of the mimicked
species consume poisonous substances that are still present in the body of the
imaginal stage butterfly. The mimics do not contain any unpalatable substances, but
due to their similar appearance, the imitators (just as the imitatees) are protected
from predators. This has an immense selective advantage and is a classic case (and
historically one of the first published examples) of Batesian mimicry, referring to the
imitation of a dangerous or inedible animal by a harmless animal to mislead the
latter s predators (Wickler, 1968).
For Poulton, the importance of these butterflies lay most of all in the fact that
erroneous conclusions could be drawn when phenotypes were used to determine
species affiliation. The females of swallowtail butterflies can differ much more
strongly from members of their own species than they do from the members of other
swallowtail species. The same phenomenon was later observed in the African
Swallowtail Papilio dardanus, which is today counted among the best known
examples of Batesian mimicry (Mallet, 1995). Here, too, the males are uniformly
shaped, whereas the females are polymorphic. In both Madagascar and Ethiopia, only