Philippine Common Snow Flat

Description:

Hesperiidae; Pyrginae; Tagiades japetus titus Plötz, 1884. Wikipedia have a very good article on Tagiades japetus and T. j. titus is included on the ssp. list which mentions that this subspecies is endemic to the Philippines. All of this information is extremely helpful, but I ran into a problem when I tried to identify the host plant of this butterfly. It all started when my wife handed me a leaf from a tree which was being trimmed in our backyard. She had noticed a cocoon on the leaf and knew I would be interested. I was very busy with some other Project Noah stuff at that moment, so I just dropped the leaf into an empty butterfly breeding cage where it would come to no harm until I could spare a minute to look at it properly. That was yesterday afternoon and I really did not have time to look at it until this morning. I saw immediately that I had a little Skipper Butterfly in the cage, it looked to be in great shape and ready to fly. So I carried the cage out to the backyard and got my camera ready. I opened the lid of the cage and got one picture (shown above) before it flew to freedom at high speed. I was very pleased. After all, one picture is much better than no picture. So in preparation for this spotting, I decided to identify the tree on which the cocoon was found. My wife knew the tree in the local Zambal dialect, but I could not find any trace of that on the web. But wiki had mentioned the host plants in their Life cycle and ecology section. So I checked the three Dioscorea species against the leaf that was still in the cage. No match there, not even close. So, back to my wife again with more questions. She thought that this tree was called something like "Isis" in Tagalog (the dialect chosen many years ago to be the national Filipino lamguage). When she spelled out the word "Isis" my heart sank. The last thing I want to do is go online and start asking about a terrorist group. I certainly would not want to be on the FBI's Watch List. So, I just couldn't bring myself to "Google" that word. Then my long-suffering wife saved the day. She said "It might help if you mention that local people use these leaves for sandpaper to smoothen wood and also for scouring pots and pans." I hadn't even noticed that the leaf was very course. The minute I keyed in "sandpaper leaf", I got a hit - Ficus fiskei. That was my host for the larva which had pupated on this leaf. There is some more about it in Habitat below. You can see the leaf in my picture above, with the empty cocoon still stuck to it. The Wiki article makes no mention of this as a possible host plant, but the evidence is right here in this spotting. I hope that this little bit of information might help someone else. That is why we are all in Project Noah, isn't it?

Habitat:

The cocoon of this Common Snow flat was spotted on a leaf of the Sandpaper Leaf Tree (Ficus fiskei) in our backyard. This tree is known in the Philippines as Isis. The pronunciation varies from region to region, but the most common appears to be as follows (I wont use phonetic symbols - not everyone is familiar with them): Think of the word "Hiss" - the sound associated with snakes. Remove the "H" and pronounce the "iss". If you say it twice, that is the pronunciation of "Isis". So we don't have to think of the murderous terrorist group who use the same letters with a different pronunciation.

Notes:

Plant identification - http://www.stuartxchange.org/Isis