Now Reading: India home to 13,703 butterfly and moth species: ZSI catalogue
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India home to 13,703 butterfly and moth species: ZSI catalogue
India is home to 13,703 species of butterflies and moths, or 8.25% of the world's lepidoptera, according to a new catalogue by Zoological Survey of India scientists Navneet Singh and Rahul Joshi.…
The Story in Brief
India is home to 13,703 species of butterflies and moths, or 8.25% of the world's lepidoptera, according to a new catalogue by Zoological Survey of India scientists Navneet Singh and Rahul Joshi. Published in the journal Zootaxa after 12 years of field work, museum curation, and literature verification, the catalogue lists 1,417 butterfly species and 12,286 moth species across 3,705 genera and 102 families. The Press Information Bureau said the work bridges taxonomic gaps that persisted for over a century, giving India an authoritative baseline inventory of its lepidoptera diversity.
The Indian Opinion
A 12-year census of moths and butterflies is a quiet triumph of Indian science. Yet lazy narratives often paint biodiversity work as a luxury or a purely academic exercise. This catalogue gives each species a legal identity, a prerequisite for conservation, forest clearance decisions, and trade regulation. The real test will be whether this baseline translates into actual protection on the ground. How many of these 13,703 species are endemic or threatened, and how many are already lost to habitat destruction?
Source: thehindu.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
