judhajit, the Yellow Gorgon (M. payeni) and its himalayan subspecies (M. p. evan) are taxonomically pretty stable. i myself tend to favor calling the indian populations of Brown Gorgon M. gyas gyas, like in most books published before the early 1980s. however, more recent books treat gyas as a synonym of M. sciron sciron, and assign the himalayan populations to sciron. as far as i know, this recent shift in taxonomy is not based so much on more evidence as on shifting personal opinion. in any case, there are only two (sub)species of Meandrusa in india (payeni evan being one of them), so indranil's picture and wynter-blyth's illustration are of the same entity, whether people prefer to call them sciron or gyas. there is some seasonal and individual variation in its wing pattern.
that was a great sighting, btw! At 12:47 PM +0530 4/25/09, judhajit dasgupta wrote: >Dear Friends, > >Recently, while we were on a trip to Jayanti, >one of our friends, Indranil Mandal had clicked >a butterfly, which, after he sent the pix to me, >turned out to be Brown Gorgon. With his >permission, I have attached the pix here. > >I have a question regarding this. How many >species of Gorgons, or Meandrusa (or Dabasa) >species are there? Two? Or Three?. In M. >Savela's "Tree of Life" webpage (last updated >sometime in 2007), there are three: payeni, gyas >and sciron. Last two species are noted as >synonymous in wiki page. But the look of the Un >wing of gyas, as painted in Wynter-Blythe or >elsewhere is not quite similar to that of >Indranil's butterfly. Savela shows the >distribution of sciron in parts of China. Some >webpages probably from Thiland and other places >in that region shows UN wing of sciron, and >those look exactly like that of Indranil's. > >Are the butterflies -- one with UN wings like >Wynter-Blythe's depiction and the one which >Indranil got, two different species, or >subspecies? What would be their nomenclature? > >Best wishes to you all. > >Judhajit > > > >Now surf faster and smarter ! Check out the new >Firefox 3 - Yahoo! Edition * ><http://in.rd.yahoo.com/tagline_firefox_1/*http://downloads.yahoo.com/in/firefox/>Click > >here! > > > > >Attachment converted: Mammoth:BrownGorgon_Jayanti.jpg (JPEG/«IC») (0018B1FA) -- Krushnamegh Kunte Post-doctoral Research Fellow FAS Center for Systems Biology Harvard University 52 Oxford St Northwest Lab Room 458.40-3 Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Ph: (617) 496-0078 Cell: (512) 577-1370 Fax: (617) 495-2196 Email: [email protected] and [email protected] Academic Website: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kunte/AcademicsHome.htm General Website: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kunte/index.htm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Enjoy -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
