Habitat, life history and oviposition choice of the endangered Bhutan Glory swallowtail Bhutanitis lidderdalii (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) in Yunnan, China
2019
Zhang, Zhizhong | Jiang, Zhicheng | Wang, Zhengyang
The Bhutan Glory, Bhutanitis lidderdalii (Atkinson, 1873) is considered to be an endangered swallowtail butterfly (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) endemic to the eastern Himalayas and the Hengduan mountains. We describe a newly-discovered habitat for B. lidderdalii in Yunnan, China. We report the life history of B. lidderdalii, observed from 2016 to 2018, both in the butterfly’s natural habitat and in captive breeding. We contrast the life cycle of B. lidderdalii in Yunnan with that of other populations recorded in Bhutan and India, as well as that of other species in the genus. In its natural habitat, the major threats to the larval stages of B. lidderdalii include inclement weather and parasitization. We add Aristolochia ovatifolia (Hwang, 1981) to the list of recorded hostplants of this species. Our biometric measurement of 419 A. ovatifolia hostplants within the study habitat shows that although B. lidderdalii is locally abundant, hostplants preferred for oviposition are < 38 cm in height and are only found within broadleaf forests with abundant nectar plants. We suggest that the conservation management of B. lidderdalii and other butterfly species that rely on patchily distributed Aristolochia hostplants focus on assessing the distribution of isolated broadleaf forest habitats within temperate pine forests and studying the species’ dispersal ability across patches.
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