Journal of Threatened Taxa | www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26
December 2019 | 11(15): 15047–15052
First
record in 129 years of the Tamil Treebrown Lethe drypetis todara Moore, 1881
(Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae)
from Odisha, India by fruit-baiting
Anirban Mahata
1, Sudheer Kumar Jena 2 &
Sharat Kumar Palita 3
1,2,3 Department
of Biodiversity and Conservation of Natural Resources, Central University of
Odisha, Koraput,
Odisha 764021, India.
1 anirbanmahata1608@gmail.com,
2 sk88088@gmail.com, 3 skpalita@gmail.com (corresponding
author)
doi: https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.4485.11.15.15047-15052
|
ZooBank: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:0ED556D3-96E2-469D-BFA1-679C2A11C80D
Editor: Sanjay Sondhi,
Titli Trust, Dehradun, India. Date
of publication: 26 December 2019 (online & print)
Manuscript details: #4485 | Received 11 August 2018
| Final received 10 October 2019 | Finally accepted 23 November 2018
Citation: Mahata, A., S.K. Jena & S.K. Palita (2019). First record in 129 years of the Tamil Treebrown Lethe drypetis todara Moore, 1881 (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae:
Satyrinae) from Odisha, India by fruit-baiting. Journal of Threatened Taxa 11(15): 15047–15052. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.4485.11.15.15047-15052
Copyright: © Mahata et al. 2019. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License. JoTT
allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and distribution of this article in any
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Funding: University Grants Commission, New Delhi.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing
interests.
Acknowledgements: We are
grateful to the University Grants Commission, New Delhi for providing Non NET
Fellowship (CUO/ACA/NNF-PHD/135) to the first author. We are also thankful to
the DFO, Koraput Forest Division, Odisha for support.
Abstract: The first record of a butterfly species, the Tamil Treebrown Lethe drypetis todara Moore, 1881 (Nymphalidae:
Satyrinae) is described from Deomali
Hill range of southern Odisha, in Eastern Ghats of India, collected by
fruit-baiting. This is the first record
from Odisha almost 129 years after its first report from Khurda
in coastal Odisha by Taylor & de Niceville in the year 1888. The ecology
and sampling of the species are described in this study.
Keywords:
Bait trap, butterfly, Eastern Ghats, ecology, Koraput.
The subfamily Satyrinae,
with about 2,500 described species, is one of the most diverse groups of
butterflies (Peña & Wahlberg 2008), comprising over a third of the Nymphalidae diversity and found on all continents except
Antarctica (Ackery et al. 1999; DeVries
2000). The group is particularly diverse
in the Neotropics, with approximately 1,200 species
in 137 genera (Lamas et al. 2004), occurring in all habitats
with vegetation from sea level to the highlands of the Andes (DeVries
1987). Satyrinae
butterflies in India are represented by 190 species under five tribes and 18
genera (Varshney & Smetacek 2015) and 30 species
in peninsular India (Kunte 2000).
The Tamil Treebrown Lethe
drypetis todara Moore,
1881, is a butterfly belonging to the subfamily Satyrinae
and the family Nymphalidae. The global distribution of the taxon is Sri
Lanka, southern India to Pachmarhi, Kashmir to Assam
and Myanmar (Mathew & Soumya 2013).
Older literature report it from Sri Lanka to peninsular India (Bingham
1905; Antram 1924), common, widespread and endemic to
these regions (Gaonkar 1996). It is locally very common in the low jungles
of the Western Ghats and the Nilgiris (Wynter-Blyth
1957). Talbot (1947) reported this
species as “not-rare” from peninsular India to Odisha region. Gaonkar (1996)
reported it from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Gujarat, and
Maharashtra. In recent times, it has
been reported from Kotagiri in the Nilgiris, the moist-deciduous forests in Biligiriranga Hills and Wyanad,
the Nadgani Ghat and Silent
Valley (Mathew & Soumya 2013). The
species has also been reported from Kalakad-Mundanthurai
Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu (Devy & Davidar 2001). There
are quite a few reports of its occurrence from various parts of southern India
particularly from the states of Karnataka (Districts of Chikkamagaluru,
Kodagu, Shivamogga, Uttara Kannada, Hassan, Mysore, and Dakshina
Kannada), Kerala (Districts of Idukki, Palakkad, Malappuram, Wayanad, and
Kozhikode), Maharashtra (Sindhudurg District) and Tamil Nadu (Districts of
Theni, Nilgiri, and Dindigul)
(Ogale 2019).
From central India, the species was reported from the Kanger Valley National Park and from Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh
(Chandra 2006; Chandra et al. 2007) as well as from Pench
Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh (Tiwari et al. 2010). The first record of the Tamil Treebrown in Eastern Ghats is from Maredumilli and Jalatarangini
waterfalls of Papikonda National Park in northern
Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh (Goswami et al. 2018). The species was recorded from wet riparian
vegetation near waterfalls.
The Eastern Ghats hill range of southern Odisha is one
of the biodiversity rich areas in Odisha (Dash et al. 2015). Although several studies on butterfly
diversity has been carried out in different parts of the Eastern Ghats (Nandi
1987; Nair 2007; Paria et al. 2018), southern Odisha
remains poorly explored except for some recent faunal inventories (Mohapatra et
al. 2014; Debata et al. 2015; Purohit et al. 2017; De
& Palita 2018; Debata
& Palita 2018; Mahata
et al. 2018). There is, however, no
record of this species from Odisha except that of a report on its occurrence
from Khurda (Figure 1) by Taylor & de Nicéville (1888), 129 years ago.
In the present study, the first record of Tamil Treebrown
from Odisha since its last sighting is described from the Deomali
Hill range of southern Odisha, in Eastern Ghats of India, trapped by
fruit-baiting.
Materials and
Methods
For the past two and half years (September 2015 to
March 2018), we have been studying the diversity and distribution of
butterflies in different parts of Koraput District. During our surveys, we used the fruit-baiting
technique in Deomali Hills (18.644–18.681 0N
and 82.968–83.016 0E) to capture nymphalid butterflies (Figure
1). Deomali is
the highest peak of Odisha (1,672m). The
fauna and flora show marked similarity with high altitude species of the
Himalayan and Western Ghats regions. The
vegetation of the hill is tropical moist deciduous type. The valleys and slopes are covered with
riparian semi-evergreen forests (Image 1), where species like Diospyros malabarica, Mangifera
indica, Ficus
spp., Rubus ellipticus,
Pittosporum wightii, Chionanthus
ramiflorus, Neolitsea
cassia, Zanthoxylum armatum
and Zanthoxylum rhetsa
are dominant. The plateau is covered
with grassland and meadows with several species of grasses of Poaceae and Cyperaceae families
such as Cyperus leucocephalus,
Fimbristylis pierotii,
Arundinella holocoides,
Themeda mooneyi
and Themeda triandra. Wide varieties of bryophytes (around 43
species) and pteridophytes (45 species) have been recorded from this region
(Dash et al. 2015). Bamboo brakes are
found in riparian regions of Deomali. Rainfall is heavy and well distributed. It covers an altitudinal range of 800–1,672 m
and above 1,400m it is devoid of arboreal species.
Butterfly
sampling
Butterfly sampling was carried out by both transect
counting and fruit-baiting technique once a month from September 2015 to March
2018 at four different sites. For butterfly
trapping, we used a homemade butterfly trap (Shuey
1997) and prepared fruit based bait for capturing Nymphalid butterflies. We placed a total of six traps; two traps
each in 200m altitude bands, e.g., 800–1,000 m, 1,000–1,200 m, and 1,200–1,400
m. In each altitude band, two traps were
placed at the midpoint of the 500m transect on both sides with a distance of 5m
from the midpoint (Figure 2). The base
of the trap was placed one meter above the ground (Image 2). We placed the trap at 16:00h for 24 hours.
Transects and baited traps were placed with the help
of GPS (GPSMAP® 64s, Garmin, US).
Microclimate parameters, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed
were measured through digital anemometer (AVM-06, HTC. India). Canopy cover was measured through GLAMA
application (Lubomír Tichý,
Dept. of Botany and Zoology, MU Brno, Czech Republic, 2014–2015), installed in
Smart phone (Moto G4 plus, 4th generation, Lenovo, China). The picture of the vegetation was taken by a
16 MP rear inbuilt camera of the smart phone at breast height and analysed by
the app (Navarro-Martı´nez et al. 2017; Mahata et al. 2018).
Light intensity was measured by Digital Light meter (LX-103, Lutron,
India). Morphological features of the
captured Tamil Treebrown (Image 3) were studied after
Mathew & Soumya (2013).
Bait
preparation
We prepared bait for six traps from the following.
Four medium-sized (10–14 cm length and 9–12 cm
diameter) overripe bananas were sliced into two centimetres thick pieces and
kept in a wide mouth 500ml beaker with a lid.
Sugar syrup was prepared with 50g of sugar in 200ml of
water in another beaker and was boiled.
It was stirred until dissolved.
The sugar syrup was added to the wide mouth beaker and
to this 10ml of beer (United Breweries, Bangalore, India) was added and
stirred.
It was left for 24 hours for fermentation.
Results and Discussion
Out of six traps, a male of Lethe drypetis todara was captured
only in one trap at the GPS location of 18.6480N & 83.0090E
on 18.03.2017 at 15:35h at an altitude of 1,296m. Along with this, three Common Bushbrown Mycalesis perseus, two individuals of Dark-brand Bushbrown Mycalesis mineus and two Bamboo Treebrown
Lethe europa, all satyrine butterflies, were also captured in
the same trap. The trap site was
beside a perennial hill stream and the major vegetation was moist deciduous
along with bamboo brakes. It was a sunny
day with an average ambient temperature of 32.380C, relative
humidity 35.48%, wind speed 1.98 m/s, light intensity- 899.66 × 100 lux and
tree canopy cover of 43.50%.
The Tamil Treebrown is
generally found in forests having bamboo brakes on which their larvae develop
(Mathew & Soumya 2013). Its larvae
feed mostly on bamboos (Bambusa arundinacea) (Sevastopulo
1973) but they also seem to feed on other grasses. The eggs are laid singly on the underside of
leaves (Mathew & Soumya 2013). In
the present study at Deomali in Odisha, Tamil Treebrown was captured through fruit-baiting from riparian
regions close to bamboo brakes.
The present report of Tamil Treebrown
Lethe drypetis todara
from Deomali Hills of Koraput after 129 years of its
report from Khurda, Odisha in the year 1888, is the
first record from Odisha and second from the Eastern Ghats of India in recent
times. The earlier recorded locations of
this species from Kanger Valley National Park of
Chhattisgarh (Chandra 2006) and Papikonda National
Park of Andhra Pradesh (Goswami et al. 2018) are
geographically close to the current site.
Of these locations Papikonda and Deomali are in the northern Eastern Ghats (Figure 1). As an endemic, common and widespread species
from Sri Lanka and southern India (Gaonkar 1996), its
range has extended from southern India towards Central India (Chandra
2006). The findings of the present
study, further connect the distribution link of this species to Odisha (Figure
1). The rediscovery of Lethe drypetis todara from Deomali Hills indicates that this species is very habitat
specific. We are of the opinion that
distribution of this species can be best understood with more sampling studies
through fruit-baiting along the Eastern Ghats hill ranges.
For
figures & images - - click here
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