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. 2017 Nov 7;8:1269. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01370-1

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Distribution and mimicry variation of the Papilio polytes species-group. The polytes species-group of Papilio swallowtail butterflies consists of four historically well-characterized taxa: two differentiated subspecies within P. polytes, P. polytes polytes (female forms from left to right: polytes (mimetic), romulus (mimetic), theseus (mimetic), and cyrus (non-mimetic)); and P. polytes alphenor (female forms from left to right: polytes (mimetic), theseus (mimetic), and cyrus (non-mimetic)), plus P. phestus (mimetic) and P. ambrax (mimetic). Also pictured is the most closely related outgroup species, P. protenor (non-mimetic). Mimicry is highly variable across taxa, spanning sexually monomorphic, non-mimetic in P. protenor, female-limited mimicry polymorphism in P. polytes polytes and P. polytes alphenor, and sexually dimorphic mimicry in P. ambrax and P. phestus. Photo credit: Wei Zhang (photos and map)