Exploitation and conservation of butterflies in the Indo-Australian region

Abstract

The amount of protein in a single butterfly is small, yet the discarded bodies of butterflies whose wings are used in Taiwan to construct tourist items such as laminated tablecloths and placemats are sufficiently numerous to be used for pig food. But, unlike most of the other taxa discussed in this book, the major commercial appeal for butterflies is not as human food or manufacturing commodities but, simply, aesthetic. Butterfly collecting is a popular hobby and, as with rare stamps and other ‘collectables’, rare but terflies can command very high prices — either legally or on a black market. In the past, a number of professional collectors in the tropics made good livings from selling specimens to wealthy collectors or patrons, and the butterflies of the western Pacific and southeast Asia have long held special fascination for collectors. Lord Walter Rothschild, who built up the largest-known private collection of Lepidoptera, containing some 2¼ million specimens, employed more than 400 collectors of butterflies and/or birds in various parts of the world. One of the major areas of concentration for collectors has been the Indo-Pacific (Figure 6.1 — after Rothschild 1983), reflecting that many of the rarest, largest and most spectacular butterflies occur there, many of them very locally, and the faunas are highly diverse. Some of the early collectors tell of shooting large, high-flying birdwing but terflies with dust-shot, or of employing local people to stun them with blunt arrows, and the lengths which were pursued to obtain such highly valued species make fascinating reading (e. g. Meek 1913).