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Habitat monitoring of an endangered Asian butterfly, Teinopalpus aureus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) and change in local residents’ conservation awareness

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Abstract

Teinopalpus aureus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) is endemic to the mountains of southern China and Vietnam. This butterfly species was the focus of several high profile poaching cases in China and influenced conservation policies in the country because of this attention. In this study we closely monitored 2.25 km2 of the butterfly’s known habitat in Mt. Dayao Nature Reserve, Guangxi Province, China, from 2012 to 2014. A total of 33 magnolia host plants were found in the plot, and 28 individuals were reared from the egg/early larval stage until they pupated or died. We found T. aureus sufficiently difficult to breed and failed to induce oviposition in captivity. In 2015, a public museum was built in Mt. Dayao Nature Reserve to raise conservation awareness of local biodiversity, which specifically featured an exhibition of T. aureus. To investigate whether the museum was effective in increasing local conservation awareness, in 2013, 2015 and 2017, a total of 1022 local residents were interviewed regarding their conservation awareness of the butterfly. Conservation awareness significantly increased with time from 2013 to 2017, but this was also strongly influenced by residence location and respondent age.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply indebted to the staff at Mt. Dayao Natural Reserve for their logistic support: B. Luo; H. Tao, J. Chen, J. Tao and W. Zhao. We thank Z. Deng for helping with the interviews. We thank J. Weintraub from the Academy of Natural Sciences for his advice on breeding butterfly in captivity. We thank N. Pierce and K. Gilbert from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology for help with revising our manuscript. Funding for this research is provided by the Lande Research Fund from Department of Biology, Swarthmore College and a Natural Science Fund from the Department of Forestry of Guangxi Province (No.127. [2011]). We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Zhengyang Wang

  2. Laboratory of the Ecology of Rare and Endangered Species and Environmental Protection, Ministry of Education, Guilin, 541004, China

    Ying Huang & Shanyi Zhou

  3. Olin Business School, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Xiang Luo

  4. Mt. Dayao Nature Reserve, 48 Jinxiu County, Laibin, China

    Kun Qin

  5. Department of Biology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, 19081, USA

    Rachel Merz

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  1. Zhengyang Wang
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Correspondence to Zhengyang Wang.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individuals included in the study.

Research involving human and animal participants

License for obtaining and rearing Teinopalpus aureus was issued by the People’s Republic of China Forestry Bureau.

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Wang, Z., Huang, Y., Luo, X. et al. Habitat monitoring of an endangered Asian butterfly, Teinopalpus aureus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) and change in local residents’ conservation awareness. J Insect Conserv 22, 721–729 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-018-0096-2

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