Graphium meeki (Rothschild, 1901)

OCCURENCE

Habitat: Forest - Subtropical/Tropical Moist Lowland
Adults fly rapidly, and only stop briefly to feed on flowers such as Lantana (Waterhouse 1937). Adults have been recorded throughout the year, and the number of generations completed annually is unknown (Braby 2000). Males are often seen flying high above the canopy clearings and females were found to fly along forest edges (Hopkinson 2013).

The native food plant in New Guinea is Xylopia , also of Annonaceae (Parsons 1999).
Females lay eggs singly on the larval food plant, but may return to deposit additional eggs (Hopkinson 2013). Many eggs are parasitised by wasps (Hopkinson 2013). Parasitism of larvae is high (M?ller 1998) and parasitism of both larvae and pupae by tachinid flies is more prevalent during the wet season (Hopkinson 2013). The species may also be naturally controlled by the green tree ant Oecophylla smaragdina which has been seen to occur on most of the food plant species of this butterfly (Hopkinson 2013).
(IUCN 2020)

Population: This species is considered uncommon in the rainforests of northern Queensland (Orr and Kitching 2010) and has generally been considered as one of Australia's rarer Papilionids (Common and Waterhouse 1981). Population abundance varies throughout its range; for example, at Weipa and on Thursday Island, it may be locally abundant at times, while in the southern Wet Tropics it is rarely observed (Braby 2000).
Range: This species is restricted to the Australasian realm, occurring from Indonesia (Maluku: Buru, Obi, Halmahera, Bacan,and possibly Seram;West Papua; possibly Aru Islands), Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago including New Britain and New Ireland, Admiralty Islands, the Torres Strait Islands, and northeastern Australia (Racheli 1980, Common and Waterhouse 1981, Collins and Morris 1985, Braby 2000, Peggie et al. 2005, Orr and Kitching 2010). The nominate subspecies macfarlanei makes up most of this range; it occurs in Maluku (including Morotai, Halmahera, Ternate, Bacan, Gebe, Obi, Waigeo, Misool, Batanta, Salawati, Aru; Peggie et al. 2005), New Guinea, in mainland New Guinea, Torres Strait Islands (e.g. Murray (Mer) Island, Hammond Island; Lambkin and Knight 1990, Lane and Moulds 2015) and northeastern Queensland (Braby 2000). Here, it has been recorded from Moa Island to the McIlwraith range (Dunn and Dunn 1991, Common and Waterhouse 1981), at Weipa (Monteith and Hancock 1977, Hancock and Monteith 2004) and from near Cooktown to Ingham (Common and Waterhouse 1981, Dunn and Dunn 1991, Braby 2000). There is also an unconfirmed southern record of a possibly vagrant individual near Bowen (Dunn 2008). Subspecies cestius has been reported from Buru, Ambelau, Seram, Ambon, and Saparua in Maluku, Indonesia (Peggie et al. 2005).

The estimated extent of occurrence of this species exceeds 4 million km². Given the paucity of locality data available, area of occupancy cannot be accurately estimated.
(IUCN 2020)

Occurrence and observation maps

Map of Life
GBIF
i-Naturalist

References

• Braby, M.F. 2000. Butterflies of Australia. Their identification, biology and distribution. CSIRO Publishing, Canberra.
• Collins, N.M. and Morris, M.G. 1985. Threatened Swallowtail Butterflies of the World. The IUCN Red Data Book. IUCN, Gland and Cambridge.
• Common, I.F.B. and Waterhouse, G.A. 1981. Butterflies of Australia. Angus & Robertson, Sydney.
• Dunn, K. L. and Dunn, L. E. 1991. Review of Australian Butterflies: distribution, life history and taxonomy. Review Of Australian Butterflies (1-4): 120-140.
• Dunn, K.L. 2008. New and interesting spatial and temporal butterfly records from eastern Australia. Victorian Entomologist 38(3): 36-45.
• Hancock, D.L. and Monteith, G.B. 2004. Some records of butterflies (Lepidoptera) from Western Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Australian Entomologist 31(1): 21-24.
• Hopkinson, M. 2013. Life history notes and new food plant records for Graphium macfarlanei macfarlanei (Butler, 1877) (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae: Papilioninae. Australian Entomologist 40(3): 101-110.
• IUCN. 2020. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2020-3. Available at: www.iucnredlist.org. (Accessed: 10 December 2020).
• Lambkin, T.A. and Knight, A.I. 1990. Butterflies recorded from Murray Island, Torres Strait, Queensland. Australian Entomological Magazine 17(4): 101-112.
• Lane, D.A. and Moulds, M.S. 2015. An annotated list of hawkmoths and butterflies (Lepidoptera) from Hammond Island, Torres Strait. Australian Entomologist 42(1): 29-34.
• Monteith, G.B. and Hancock, D.L. 1977. Range extensions and notable records for butterflies of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. The Australian Entomologist 4(2): 21-38.
• Orr, A. and Kitching, R. 2010. The Butterflies of Australia. Jacana Books, Crows Nest.
• Parsons, M. 1999. The butterflies of Papua New Guinea: their systematics and biology. Academic Press., London.
• Peggie, D., Rawlins, A. and Vane-Wright, R.I. 2005. An illustrated checklist of the papilionid butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) of northern and central Maluku, Indonesia. Nachr. entomol. Ver. Apollo 26(1/2): 41-60.
• Racheli, T. 1980. A list of Papilionidae (Lepidoptera) of the Solomon Islands, with notes on their geographical distribution. Australian Entomological Magazine 7(4): 45-59.
• Waterhouse, G.A. 1937. The biology and taxonomy of Australian butterflies. Rep. Aus. & NZ Ass. Adv. Sci. 23: 101-133.