The World of Birdwing Butterflies

ORNITHOPTERA CROESUS

IUCN conservation status category: VULNERABLE.

It was during a visit to Bacan Island in 1859 that Alfred Russell Wallace first observed a female of Ornithoptera croesus. It took, however, as much as three months before he finally managed to catch the first specimen, a male. His triumph was a direct result of his identification of shrubs with yellow flowers, Mussaenda, to be attractive to the imagoes of croesus.

Mr. Wallace's accounts of his capture is well known and has been published again later by several authors:

"During my first walk into the forest, I had seen sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark colour marked with white and yellow. I could not capture it as it flew away high up in the forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of a new species of Ornithoptera, the pride of the Eastern Tropics. I was very eager to get it and to find the male, which in this genus is always of extreme beauty. During the two succeeding months I only saw it once again, and shortly afterwards I saw the male flying high in the air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild; till one day, about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble creatures hovering over it, but it was too quick for me and flew away. The next day I went again to the same shrub and succeeding in catching a female, and the day after a fine male. I found it to be as I had expected, a perfectly new and most magnificent species, and one of the most gorgeously butterflies in the world. Fine specimens of the male are more than seven inches across the wings, which are velvety black and fiery orange, the latter colour replacing the green of the allied species. The beauty and brilliance of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death!

I had decided to return to Ternate in a week or two, but this grand capture determined me to stay until obtained a good series of this new butterfly which I have since named Ornithoptera croesus.

I thus was able to bring away with me more than a hundred of both sexes, including perhaps twenty very fine males, though not more than five or six that were absolutely perfect".

O. croesus is a low-land species, occurring in swamps and wet places. According to Smiet (1982) as much as 90% of all forests in the northern and central Moluccas was under concession to large-scale commercial logging operations. Additional threats to croesus comes from large-scale use of insecticides against mosquitoes.

Although it is believed that croesus - at least subspecies croesus and lydius - are more numerous in nature than what early collectors reported, there is no doubt that croesus is under a continued threat from human activities.

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