Fruit-feeding butterfly diversity in a large city in southern India

Urban environments can host a wide variety of wild animals and plants, potentially contributing to conservation and facilitating city-dwellers' contact with nature. In a large city in southern India, we performed long-term sampling of fruit-feeding butterflies of two sites with mainly open habitats, and more modest sampling in two closed-canopy sites. We also sampled a nearby natural forest for comparison. We caught 3625 butterflies belonging to 29 species, of which sixteen species were recorded in the open habitats, and a further five species in the closed-canopy sites in the city. The open habitats in the city featured a protected species, the Gaudy Baron ( Euthalia lubentina (Cramer, 1777)), and closed-canopy sites had charismatic forest species such as the Clipper ( Parthenos sylvia (Cramer, [1775])) and Indian Nawab ( Polyura athamas (Drury) 1773). Community composition differed significantly among sites and sampling months. Overall, our results show that habitats within the city have fruit-feeding butterfly diversity comparable to that of natural forests, and are thus worth conserving for nature education.