Papilio machaon not fertile.

Lepiflow

Hello there,

I'm breeding p machaon since a few years, this year, I wanted to add some new blood to my bloodline.
So I got some out of Poland, other ones were Spain.
Now I crossed those 2, but, not one eggs hatched, or even changed color.

Is it possible, that due to genetic difference, these 2 are not fertile?
It happened with 2 different females, with different males, so it wasn't just by purpose!

Juraj

Seems that I have my half stock from Poland from the same source, and everything is O.K. when paired with Slovak line.
How many pairings You have? It don´t seems that it is problem of genetics.

Lepiflow

Overwintered them in the fridge, at 2-5 degrees,
Took out the half of them in march, had a pairing that time, and last week.
Eggs just do not change color, while poland x poland hatched in march, and spain x spain too!

Lepiflow

But the butterflies had a different size and color, poland were some more white, spanish were Yellow, and the coloration of the blue was also different.
I mated spain x belgium before, without problems!

altmeyer

what I have to add is not perfectly on-topic, but related:

The last year and this year I tried to mate P. machaon without handpairng quite a lot of times. I always tried to add various different blood lines and found that "natural" paring in a cage happend easily in the same line and was much more difficult, if not impossible with different blood lines, so that handpairing was inevitable there. Up to now I can not report on aspects of different fertility.

kind regards, Stefan

PS: For those who care, since I live in Germany - I have a legal allowance for breeding P. machaon

Klaas

There might be a coincidental genetic cause for the unfertility of your Polish x Spanish eggs (mutations/translocations etc. in either of the parents), but this has nothing
to do with the two populations of Papilio machaon being genetically too far apart from each other. Crossing Papilio machaon with other related Papilio species that are much
more genetically distinct often results in > 95% of the eggs being fertile!

Groeten, Klaas

Lepiflow

Both true, because they both belong to machaon, and will have the same amount of chromosomes, there would always be some fertile.
The only strange was, that the polish x polish did gave fertile eggs.
So the females might not been fertile from themselves, but what could have caused this?

Jetzt mitmachen!