The great four-ring. Photo: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
GUWAHATI
A four-ringed butterfly belonging to a family with most members in China has resurfaced in India after 61 years, a new study said.
A policeman is one of four authors of the paper describing the great four-ring (Ypthima cantliei), a species of Satyrinae butterfly, published by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS).
The butterfly was recorded in 2018 from the Namdapha National Park by Roshan Upadhaya, a member of the Arunachal Pradesh Police, Monsoon Jyoti Gogoi of BNHS, and Renu Gogoi and Rezina Ahmed of the Guwahati-based Cotton University’s Department of Zoology.
Namdapha, straddling 1,985 sq. km. of Arunachal Pradesh’s Changlang district, is India’s easternmost tiger reserve bordering Myanmar. The park has an elevation ranging from 298.7 metres above the mean sea level to 4,498.8 metres.
“The great four-ring was photographed during a survey to document the butterfly diversity in the Miao range of the Namdapha National Park during 2018-19. It was identified based on general morphological patterns and habitat,” Mr. Upadhaya told The Hindu on Saturday.
“Little is known about the current distribution or population of this species, which was last reported in 1957 from (eastern) Assam’s Margherita, 61 years before our documentation,” he said.
A coal town, Margherita was named after an Italian queen by C.R. Paganini, the chief engineer who supervised the construction of Assam’s first railway line in the 1880s.
Ypthima is considered a rich genus of the family Nymphalidae which has some 6,000 species of butterflies. Of the 35 Ypthima species recorded in India, 23 have been reported from the northeast.
The highest Ypthima diversity is in China, particularly in the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. The diversity is also vast in Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar apart from the northeastern part of India.
The great four-ring has dull brown-grey wings with three yellow-ringed single eye spots (ocelli) on its hind wing and a large bi-pupilled apical ocellus obscurely ringed with yellow on the forewing above. It is larger compared to other species of the genus Ypthima.
Arunachal Pradesh has more than 600 of the 1,327 species of butterflies recorded in India so far.
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