AJP photographed this Great Mormon Butterfly (Papilio mormon) in the garden in May. He has seen large numbers of this large butterfly (around 5 inches -125 mm) this year.
Females are highly polymorphic. In some parts of southern Asia the females mimic toxic butterflies. The fact that the males have the choice of a number of different female forms within an area seems to have been responsible for their common name of ‘mormon’.
Great Mormons figured in one of the key papers on mimicry and its evolution. Ian Thornton (1926-2002) then Reader in Zoology in the University of Hong Kong sent specimens to Liverpool for breeding experiments and was a co-author of the paper with Sir Cyril Clarke (1907-2000) and Philip Shepherd (1921-1976) which was published in Transactions of the Royal Society in 1968.
I only discovered that Ian Thornton had been involved in work on the genetics of the Great Mormon when writing this note. I then recalled something odd about the department of zoology in those days. I never recall a single internal seminar. External visitors and talks by a host of distinguished scientists calling in Hong Kong, yes; but talks by staff and PhD students on what they were doing, no.
Clarke CA, Sheppard PM, Thornton IWB. 1968. The genetics of the mimetic butterfly Papilio memnon L.. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 254 37–89. doi:10.1098rstb.1968.0013
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