Journal of Threatened Taxa |
www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26 June 2020 | 12(9): 16177–16179
ISSN 0974-7907 (Online) | ISSN 0974-7893
(Print)
doi: https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.4223.12.9.16177-16179
#4223 | Received 28 April 2018 | Final
received 31 May 2020 | Finally accepted 08 June 2020
First record of the White Tufted
Royal Pratapa deva lila Moore, [1884]
(Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae: Theclinae)
from Himachal Pradesh, extending its known range westwards
Sanjay Sondhi
Titli Trust, 49 Rajpur
Road Enclave, Dhoran Khas, Dehradun, Uttarakhand
248001, India.
Indian Foundation for
Butterflies, C-703, Alpine Pyramid, Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka
560097, India.
Editor: Yu-Feng Hsu, National Taiwan
Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Date
of publication: 26 June 2020 (online & print)
Citation: Sondhi, S. (2020). First record of the
White Tufted Royal Pratapa deva lila Moore,
[1884] (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae: Theclinae)
from Himachal Pradesh, extending its known range westwards. Journal of Threatened Taxa 12(9): 16177–16179. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.4223.12.9.16177-16179
Copyright: © Sondhi 2020. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License. JoTT allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and
distribution of this article in any medium by providing adequate credit to the
author(s) and the source of publication.
Funding: Titli Trust helped fund the travel and boarding and lodging costs.
Competing interests: The author declares no competing interests.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Tarun Jayaram, who accompanied him on this nature trail and
helped observe the butterfly. Thanks are due to the author’s wife, Anchal Sondhi, who unstintingly
supports his travels to the wilds.
The butterflies of Himachal
Pradesh are quite well studied. The earliest publication of the butterflies
from Himachal Pradesh was that of the Simla Hills.
G.V.W. de Rhe-Philipe published a series of papers
listing butterflies of the Simla Hills in 1931 (de Rhe-Philipe 1931).
Subsequently, Wynter-Blyth added to the butterfly checklist of Simla through a series of publications between 1940 and
1947 (Wynter-Blyth 1941–1947). More
recently, there have been numerous publications on butterflies from Himachal
Pradesh by researchers and scientists.
The White Tufted Royal Pratapa
deva lila Moore, [1884] is reported for the first
time from Himachal Pradesh, during opportunistic surveys, extending its known
range westwards.
Two subspecies of the lycaenid,
White Tufted Royal Pratapa deva (Moore, [1858]) are known to occur in
India. The nominate species Pratapa
deva deva Moore, [1858] occurs in peninsular
India and Sri Lanka while Pratapa deva lila Moore,
[1888] was previously known to occur from Uttarakhand eastwards to Eastern
Himalaya, northeastern India, Myanmar, and Thailand
(Singh & Bhandari 2003; Varshney & Smetacek
2015; Kunte et al. 2018; Sondhi
& Kunte 2018; Savela
2018).
On 1 August 2017, during a visit
to Dharamshala, Kangra District in Himachal Pradesh,
I recorded a male White Tufted Royal Pratapa deva lila
Moore, [1888] at 15.39h (Image 1; Image 2). The butterfly was observed between the
Chinmaya Ashram and the Himachal Pradesh Vidhan Sabha
at Sidhbari (32.1793901N & 76.3779831E), a suburb
of Dharamshala, at an altitude of 1,400m.
The butterfly had freshly emerged and was sitting on a bush, which was
covered with the parasitic creeper, Loranthus. Members of the genus Pratapa are known
to use plant species of the family Loranthaceae as
their larval host plants and Loranthus tomentosus B. Heyne ex Roth
is listed as one of its hosts from India (Robinson et al. 2010).
A review of older literature on
Indian butterflies (Evans 1932; Wynter-Blyth 1957; Cantlie 1963) lists the
Indian distribution of Pratata deva lila Moore, [1888] as Uttarakhand eastwards to Eastern
Himalaya. Wynter-Blyth (1957), however,
mentions records of this species from the “Ambala plains” hence it has been
recorded in the state of Haryana, too. Kehimkar (2016) mentions the distribution of this species
as “Himachal-Arunachal, W. Bengal, NE” but without offering any corroboration
or evidence to support its presence in Himachal Pradesh. Older publications
specifically focused on Himachal Pradesh (Moore 1882; de Rhe-Philipe
1931; Ferrar 1934; Wynter-Blyth 1941–1947) including
the elaborate listing from the Simla hills by de Rhe-Philipe and additional records by Wynter-Blyth do not
list this species. More recent
publications on Indian butterflies (Varshney & Smetacek
2015; Singh & Sondhi 2016; Sondhi
& Kunte 2018) corroborate the distribution from
Uttarakhand eastwards. An extensive
perusal of recent butterfly literature from Himachal Pradesh (Kumar & Juneja 1977; Mehta et al. 2002; Thakur et al. 2002; Uniyal 2007; Singh 2008; Arora et al. 2009; Saini et al.
2009; Singh & Banyal 2013; Chandel
et al. 2014; Sharma et al. 2015) reveals no records of this species from
Himachal Pradesh. Moreover, there are no
records of this species from Himachal Pradesh on the Butterflies of India
website (Kunte et al. 2018) either.
Hence, this record of Pratapa
deva lila Moore, [1888] from Dharamshala extends
the range of this species westwards and it represents the westernmost record at
the edge of its global distributional range.
Henceforth, the Indian distribution of this subspecies should be listed
as Himachal Pradesh (Dharamshala), Haryana (Ambala plains), Uttarakhand east to
Eastern Himalaya and the hills of northeastern
India.
References
Arora, G.S., H.S. Mehta &
V.K. Walia (2009). Handbook on Butterflies of
Himachal Pradesh. Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata, 160pp.
Cantlie, K. (1963). The Lycaenidae
portion (except the Arhopala group) of Brigadier
Evans’ The Identification of Indian Butterflies 1932 (India, Pakistan, Ceylon,
Burma). Bombay Natural History Society, Bombay vi+156pp.
Chandel, S., V. Kumar, B.P. Sharma &
R. Patiyal (2014). Butterfly fauna of Shivalik hills areas of Kangra
and Hamirpur districts of Himachal Pradesh in India. Life Sciences Leaflets
55: 25–38.
de Rhe-Philipe,
G.W.V. (1931). The
butterflies of the Simla Hills. Journal of the
Bombay Natural History Society 35: 172–184, 415–429, 620–634.
Evans, W.H. (1932). The Identification of Indian
Butterflies. 2nd revised edition. Bombay Natural History
Society, Bombay, x+454pp+32pl.
Ferrar, M.L. (1934). A butterfly ground in Kulu. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society
37(1): 230–233.
Kehimkar, I. (2016). Butterflies of India.
Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai, xii+528pp.
Kumar, A. & D.P. Juneja (1977). Some distributional records of butterflies
(Lepidoptera: Rhopalocera) from Himachal Pradesh (Western
Himalayas). Newsletter Zoological Survey of India 3(6): 410–415.
Kunte, K., S. Sondhi
& P. Roy (2018). Butterflies of India, v. 2.39. Indian Foundation for
Butterflies. Accessed on 26 April 2018.
Mehta, H.S., M.S. Thakur, R.M.
Sharma & V.K. Mattu (2002). Butterflies of Pong Dam wetland,
Himachal Pradesh. Bionotes 5: 37–38.
Moore, F. (1882). List of the Lepidoptera
collected by the Rev. J.H. Hocking chiefly in the Kangra
District, N.W. Himalaya; with descriptions of new genera and species. Proceedings
of the Zoological Society of London 234–263.
Robinson, G.S., P.R. Ackery, I.J. Kitching, G.W. Beccaloni
& L.M. Hernández (2010). HOSTS - A Database of the World’s Lepidopteran Hostplants. Natural
History Museum, London. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosts Accessed 26
April 2018.
Saini, K., A.K. Sidhu & H.S.
Mehta (2009). Insecta: Lepidoptera: Rhopalocera in Faunal Diversity of Pong Dam and its
Catchment Area, Wetland Ecosystem Series, Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata.
12: 21–41.
Savela, M. (2018). Lepidoptera and some other life
forms. http://ftp.funet.fi/index/Tree_of_life/insecta/lepidoptera/
Accessed 27 April 2018.
Sharma, N., P. Kumar & P.C. Tak (2015). A preliminary study on butterflies of the Kathlaur-Kaushlian Wildlife Sanctuary, Pathankot, Punjab, India.
Journal of Threatened Taxa 7(9): 7557–7562. https://doi.org/10.11609/JoTT.o3882.7557-62
Singh, A.P. (2008). Butterflies of Renuka Wildlife
Sanctuary, Sirmaur District, Himachal Pradesh, India.
The Indian Forester 134(10): 1326–38.
Singh, A.P. & R.S. Bhandari
(2003). Butterfly
diversity in tropical moist deciduous sal (Shorea robusta)
forests of Dehradun valley: the lower western Himalayas. Indian Forester
129(10): 1257–1269.
Singh, A.P. & S. Sondhi (2016). Butterflies of Garhwal, Uttarakhand,
western Himalaya, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa 8(4): 8666–8697. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.2254.8.4.8666-8697
Singh, V. & H.S. Banyal (2013). Insect Fauna of Khajjiar
Lake of Chamba District, Himachal Pradesh, India. Pakistan
Journal of Zoology 45: 1053–1061.
Sondhi, S. & K. Kunte
(2018). Butterflies
of Uttarakhand: A Field Guide. Bishen Singh Mahendra
Pal Singh, Titli Trust, National Centre for
Biological Sciences and Indian Foundation for Butterflies, x+310pp.
Thakur, M.S., H.S. Mehta &
V.K. Mattu (2002). Butterflies of Kalatop-Khajjiar wildlife sanctuary, Himachal Pradesh, Zoos’
Print Journal 17(10): 909–910. https://doi.org/10.11609/JoTT.ZPJ.17.10.909-10
Uniyal, V.P. (2007). Butterflies in the Great
Himalayas Conservation Landscape in Himachal Pradesh, Western Himalayas. Entomon 32(2): 119–127.
Varshney, R.K. & P. Smetacek (2015). A Synoptic Catalogue of the
Butterflies of India. Butterfly Research Centre, Bhimtal
and Indinov Publishing, New Delhi, ii+261pp.
Wynter-Blyth, M.A. (1940-–1947). A list of butterflies of the
Shimla hills. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 41: 719–741,
42: 448; 43: 672–673; 45: 256–257; 46: 735–736.
Wynter-Blyth, M.A. (1957). Butterflies of The Indian
Region. Bombay Natural History Society, Bombay, xx+523pp.