Journal of Threatened Taxa |
www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26 March 2021 | 13(3): 18042–18044
ISSN 0974-7907 (Online) | ISSN 0974-7893
(Print)
https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.6348.13.3.18042-18044
#6348 | Received 30 June 2020 | Final
received 01 January 2021 | Finally accepted 11 March 2021
Rediscovery of the rare Desert
Grizzled Skipper Spialia doris evanida Butler,
1880 (Hesperiidae: Pyrginae)
from the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India
Shyam Sundar
Meena 1, Anil Tripathi 2, Vijay Kumar Koli
3 & M. Akram
Awan 4
1 S.B.K. Government College, Barmer Road, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan 345001, India.
2 Aquatic Ecology and Biodiversity
Research Lab, MLV Government College, Bhilwara,
Rajasthan 311001, India.
3 Wildlife Research Laboratory,
Department of Zoology, Mohanlal Sukhadia University,
Udaipur, Rajasthan 313001, India.
4 Hattar Road, Ayubia
Town, Taxila 47080, District Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan.
1 ssmeena001@gmail.com, 2 aniltripathi9@gmail.com,
3 vijaykoli87@yahoo.in (corresponding author), 4 ackramawan@gmail.com
Editor: Anonymity
requested. Date of publication:
26 March 2021 (online & print)
Citation: Meena, S.S., A. Tripathi, V.K. Koli & M.A. Awan (2021). Rediscovery of the rare Desert
Grizzled Skipper Spialia doris
evanida Butler, 1880 (Hesperiidae:
Pyrginae) from the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa 13(3): 18042–18044. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.6348.13.3.18042-18044
Copyright: © Meena et al 2021. 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: The work
is not funded by any funding
agency.
Competing interests: The authors
declare no competing interests.
Acknowledgements: We thank to Dr.
Dheeren Panwar for plant identification.
The Desert
Grizzled Skipper Spialia doris, also
known as the Aden Skipper, prefers an arid and rocky environment and was first
described from ‘Tajora’ (Tadjoura,
Djibouti) by Walker (1870). It is
distributed in northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Turkmenistan, Iraq,
Iran, Pakistan, and India (Tshikolovets & Pages
2016; Veronik et al. 2018). The species is further identified at four
subspecies levels (Cock 2016): 1) Spialia
d. doris (Walker, 1870); 2) S. d. amenophis (Reverdin, 1914);
3) S. d. daphne (Evans, 1949), and 4) S. d.
evanida (Butler, 1880) (Evans 1949; de Jong 1978;
Larsen 2005). Although globally listed
as ‘Least Concern’ on the IUCN Red List (van Swaay et
al. 2014), it is rare, sporadically distributed and has not been seen in the
past 67 years (see below) in India. In
this paper we report the rediscovery of this species from the Thar Desert,
Rajasthan (western India) with a note about its habitat and collate all
available information to provide a complete database for S. d. evianida.
On 7 October 2016, around
17.55h, SSM spotted and photographed a butterfly sitting on top of an
inflorescence of Dactyloctenum aristatum grass (Image 1) about 30cm high, near a power
sub-station Lodurva, Jaisalmer (26.9420N
& 70.8750E), Rajasthan.
The weather was dull and pleasant with ambient temperature of about 30°C
when the butterfly was spotted. As the
butterfly was photographed just prior to sunset, the individual may have been
there to stay for the night and was sitting at an optimal height above the
ground that may have helped it avoid ground predators such as lizards, skink,
and snakes. Later it was identified as Spialia doris evanida with the help of the literature (Evans 1932,
1949; de Jong 1978; Roberts 2001; Tshikolovets &
Pages 2016), and the images available on the world wide web. The area where the individual was spotted had
shrub and bushy, sparse grassland habitat.
The main plant species were Acacia sp., Calotropis
procera, Laptodania
pyrotechnica, Euphorbia sp., Zizyphus sp., Crotalaria burhia, Heliotropium bacciferum, and Convolvulus sp. (Image 2). As it was the monsoon season, there was a
temporary water channel at about 100m distance with a few puddles in its bed.
The S. doris
is different from S. galba (the only other
species of this genus known in India), having a smaller size with a forewing
length of 9–11 mm (vs 11–13 mm in S. galba),
under hindwing ground colour being paler greyish-brown with a faint yellow tint
(vs darker brown in S. galba) and bands on
under hindwing being broken into spots (vs prominent basal and discal bands being present in S. galba)
(Tshikolovets & Pages 2016) (Image 1). The S. galba
is seen in grasslands as well as in forests up to 1,300m in the Himalaya and
2,700 m in the hills of southern India, but which is found absent in arid and
wet dense habitats (Kehimkar
2008). Its identified larval food
plants are Hibiscus sp., Sida rhombifolia (Malvaceae), and Waltheria indica (Sterculiaceae), while plants of Malvaceae
and Convolvulaceae (include Corchorus
sp., Convolvulus sp.) preferred by S. doris
(Pittaway 1980; Benyamini
1984; Pittaway 1985; Pittaway
et al. 2006; Cock 2016; Norfolk & Dathe
2019). Robert (2001) identified Rosaceae family members, particularly Potentilla
supina, and possibly Neurada
procumbens as species of larval food
plants particularly to S. d. evanidus.
The subspecies of S. doris found in Iran, Pakistan and India are known as S.
d. evanida (Butler 1880). It was first discovered (and described as a
new species) from Sao, near Hubb River, Balochistan, Pakistan (type specimen was collected on 20
November, 1879 and figured in Tshikolovets &
Pages (2016)). This subspecies was later
collected from Deesa, Rajputana (currently
located in the state of Gujarat, India), and Campbellpur,
Punjab (Pakistan) (Evans 1949). In Iran,
this taxon has been recorded extensively from Tehran, Alborz, Khorasan,
Kerman provinces and southern drier provinces from Ilam
to Busher (Tshikolovets et
al. 2014; Naderi 2019) (Figure 1). Evans (1932) retained its specific status (Spialia evanidus)
and named it also the Sindh Skipper.
Evans (1949) then synonymized evanida
with the nominate subspecies. We follow
de Jong (1978), Tshikolovets et al. (2014), Tshikolovets & Pages (2016), Naderi
(2019), Van Gasse (2018), and Anonymous (2020a) and
accept Spialia doris
evanida (Butler 1880) as a valid subspecies.
The S. d. evanida
is recently rediscovered from Pakistan (Anonymous 2020b). As, only a male of the species was for the
first and last time collected from India by Evans (1949), the present finding
is an important record of this rare species and after 67 years, it is a
rediscovery. Further, more attention of
researchers and detailed survey in the Thar Desert may help to track this
species and its natural history in future.
For
figure & images - - click here
References
Anonymous
(2020a). Grizzled
Skippers, Sandmen. Spialia Swinhoe [1912]. http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/Tree_of_life/insecta/lepidoptera/ditrysia/hesperioidea/hesperiidae/pyrginae/spialia/
Electronic version accessed 26 June
2020.
Anonymous
(2020b). Sighting of
the rarest butterfly. Wildlife and Environment Quaterly
Magazine (Pakistan) 27(1): 9.
Benyamini, D. (1984). The butterflies of the Sinai
Peninsula (Lep. Rhopalocera).
Nota Lepidopterologica 7(4): 309–321.
Butler, A.G.
(1880). On the
small collection of Lepidoptera from Western India and Beloochistan.
Annals and Magazine of Natural History 5(27): 221–226. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1881.tb01315.x
Cock, M.J.W.
(2016). Observation
on the biology of Afrotropical Hesperiidae
(Lepidoptera) with particular reference to Kenya. Part 10. Pyrginae,
Carcharodini. Zootaxa
4173(4): 301–350. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4173.4.1
De Jong, R.
(1978). Monograph of
the genus Spialia Swinhoe
(Lepidoptera, Hesperiidae). Tijdschrift
voor Entomologie 121:
23–146.
Evans, W.H.
(1932). The
Identification of Indian Butterflies, 2nd Edition. Bombay
Natural History Society, Bombay, 454pp.
Evans, W.H.
(1949). A catalogue
of the Hesperiidae from Europe, Asia and Australia in
the British Museum (Natural History). British Museum (Natural
History), London, 502pp.
Kehimkar, I. (2008). The Book of Indian
Butterflies. Bombay Natural History Society and Oxford University Press,
497pp.
Larsen, T.B.
(2005). Butterflies
of West Africa. 2 vols. Apollo Books, Stenstrup,
Denmark, 595pp.
Naderi, A. (2019). Fieldguide
to the butterflies of Iran. (in Persian) Iran-Shenasi
Publishers, Tehran, 528pp.
Norfolk, O.
& H.H. Dathe (2019). Filling the Egyptian pollinator
knowledge-gap: checklist of flower-visiting insects in south Sinai, with new
records for Egypt. Contributions of Entomology 69(1): 175–184.
Pittaway, A.R., T.B. Larsen, A. Legrain, J. Majer, Z. Weidenhoffer & M. Gillet (2006). The establishment of an American
butterfly in the Arabian Gulf: Brephidium exilis (Boisduval, 1852) (Lycaenidae). Nota lepidopterologica
29(1/2): 5–16.
Pittaway, A.R. (1980). Butterflies (Lepidoptera) of
Qatar, April–June, 1979. Entomologist’s Gazette 31: 103–111.
Pittaway, A.R. (1985). Lepidoptera: Rhopalocera
of Western Saudi Arabia. Fauna of Saudi Arabia 7: 172–193.
Reverdin, H. (1914). Philosophie de la religion: iii
-la doctrine de jean-jacques gourd. Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie (9): 191–222.
Roberts,
T.J. (2001). The
butterflies of Pakistan. Oxford University Press, Karachi, 290pp.
Tshikolovets, V. & J. Pages (2016). The Butterflies of Pakistan.
Pardubice, 318pp.
Tshikolovets, V.V., A. Naderi
& W. Eckweiler (2014). The Butterflies of Iran and
Iraq. Tshikolovets Publishers, Pardubice, 440pp.
Van Gasse, P. (2018). Butterflies of India-Annoted Checklist. https://indiabiodiversity.org/biodiv/content/documents/document-9a8e4cc3-4547-456a-9cb7-d93e8c90ae75/268.pdf
Electronic version accessed on 20 June 2020.
van Swaay, C., Wynhoff, I., Wiemers, M., Katbeh-Bader, A.,
Power, A., Benyamini, D., Tzirkalli,
E., Balletto, E., Monteiro, E., Karaçetin, E., Franeta, F., Pe’er, G., Welch,
H., Thompson, K., Pamperis, L., Dapporto,
L., Šašić, M., López Munguira,
M., Micevski, N., Dupont, P., Garcia-Pereira, P., Moulai, R., Caruana, R., Verovnik,
R., Bonelli, S. & Beshkov,
S. (2014). Spialia doris. The IUCN Red List of
Threatened Species 2014: e.T62148651A62149520. Downloaded
on 20 March 2021.
Verovnik, R., S. Beretta & M. Rowlings (2018). Contribution to the knowledge
of the spring butterfly fauna of the southern Anti-atlas region, Morocco
(Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea). SHILAP Revista de Lipidopterologia 46(181): 81–90.
Walker, F.
(1870). A list of
the butterflies collected by Lord, J.K. in Egypt, along the African shore of
the Red Sea; and in Arabia; with descriptions of the species new to science. The
Entomologist 5(4): 48–57.