rjb
Full Member
Posts: 187
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Post by rjb on Jul 25, 2011 18:30:09 GMT -8
I visited Thailand a couple times this year, tagging along while my wife had business in Bangkok. In February I took off for a week in Khao Yai National Park. Stayed in one of the park Bungalows and spent each day hiking the trails. Also used a flashlight for night walks. This was the dry season, and I saw lots of insects with almost no mosquitoes or other pests, only a few ticks. Had a great time. Once on a night walk I walked over a bunch of termites. They amazed me by going into a collective rattling mode where they all jiggled at once making a loud rattle then all stopped. This continue to pulse for a long while. Last month I returned for three weeks. First I spent another week in Khao Yai. Then I spent a week camping in Kaeng Krachan (which has tigers and leopards as part of the fauna). Then my wife and I flew to Chiang Mai and spent a week in Doi Inthenon staying in a bungalow in a Karen village, we also went to the beautiful Op Luong Gorge. Even though this was now rainy season, the mosquitoes were not bad. I hardly used any DEET. The leeches were very aggressive and I lost a lot of blood. This was the worst leech experience though I've seen them in Malaysia and Indonesia. The insects were not all that much more numerous than in February. In Kaeng Krachan the butterflies were abundant. I don't know butterflies, only beetles so I only photographed a few on the road. I experienced rain in all parks, but it was only occasional and most days were quite pleasant though hot and humid. Overall these are very nice parks to visit. Unfortunately Thailand doesn't allow collecting in any of these parks, as if it could somehow harm something! This seems to be the unfortunate trend these days. The parks allow villagers to destroy the habitat but won't let collectors take insects. I'll try to insert a few photos, but my photography skill is very low. Rick Oh well, I could not figure out how to insert more than one picture. Attachments:
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Post by downundermoths on Jul 25, 2011 22:54:40 GMT -8
Thanks, Rick...Nice photo...More please
Barry
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Post by nomihoudai on Jul 26, 2011 1:57:13 GMT -8
Very nice! It is not possible to make more than one picture per post, BUT you can click reply to your first post and then make a new post (within the same topic) and add another picture.
I was in the tropics too for the first time this year but I did not see any butterflies puddling, so I wonder if I really was in the tropics =/
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Post by wollastoni on Jul 26, 2011 9:01:42 GMT -8
Claude, you did not pee around enough...
More seriously, in Asia they are not that common. I have never seen such big puddling pictures as Ricks and I have been more than 10 times in tropical Asia/Oceania. I have seen some but never with 30 Papilionidae... maximum 10 maybe ... I have heard they are more common in South America.
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rjb
Full Member
Posts: 187
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Post by rjb on Jul 26, 2011 16:33:12 GMT -8
I saw thousands of butterflies on the road. However, while eating lunch up at the top, I met a lady who has lived in the area for 30 years. She was complaining at how few butterflies she had seen on the same drive we had just done! She said this was nothing like she usually sees in Kaeng Krachan. Really made me wonder! Rick
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Post by Adam Cotton on Jul 29, 2011 0:42:05 GMT -8
Great photo, which I found extremely amusing, but sad in a way.
Here in Thailand Papilio protenor is a protected species under Thai law because the person tasked with recommending species of insects for protection checked in the government collection at the Dept of Agriculture and found that there was only as single specimen of protenor in the whole collection. Your photo has at least 10 males of P. protenor in the mass of puddling butterflies. They are the large dark ones without red at the base of the hindwings (P. memnon has a red base).
This just goes to show that actually P. protenor is locally common in the right habitat, which is the case across the range of the species. Kaeng Krachan is the extreme southern limit of its range, so it is not surprising that a common species in much of Asia should be scarce in Thailand. Papilio protenor is also found in various places down the main range of mountains in western Thailand (Kanchanaburi, Tak, Mae Hong Son), and may also be present in some localities in the north, possibly around Nan province.
Personally I would recommend that Papilio protenor should be delisted from protection under Thai law, but I don't have any influence over the governing body who regulates such matters.
Adam.
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Post by africaone on Jul 29, 2011 1:14:53 GMT -8
In Africa it is not so uncommon ! I have seen one time an exceptional path of about 1 meter square full of papilionidae (probably hundreds, not far from thousand). I started to count them and realised quickly it was impossible. I found this path at about 16h00 under the vegetation of a gallery forest on the mud of a river bank (Congo, Katanga, Bukama along the Lualaba river, may 1986). They were probably attracted during the day by the mud (as usual) during the sunny hours for this place and were like sleeping (probably because of the shade). They were so close each other that it was no space betwen them and all with wings closed, like there were drug. What was also strange it that it were very few pieridae and lycaenidae (in a "normal" situation there are many more than papilionidae) I never forgot this incredible scene despite it was 25 years ago. I was so fascinated that i didn't catch any of them and let the scene safe. An event in an entomological life. It was something mystic in this scene. ps : All were the common species of the region (constantinus, demodocus, hesperus, nireus, policenes, antheus, ucalegon). Thierry
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Post by wollastoni on Jul 29, 2011 1:53:02 GMT -8
Thierry < must have been fantastic.
I have such a souvenir in Papua, in km48 of the Pass Valley, where there were a Delias flying every one meter... after a 2 weeks treck where we caught only 5 or 10 Delias per day.
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Post by Adam Cotton on Jul 29, 2011 8:49:51 GMT -8
Claude, you did not pee around enough... More seriously, in Asia they are not that common. I have never seen such big puddling pictures as Ricks and I have been more than 10 times in tropical Asia/Oceania. I have seen some but never with 30 Papilionidae... maximum 10 maybe ... I have heard they are more common in South America. The main problem is that such large gatherings usually only occur in lowland forest during the dry season in SE Asia (late February to April), and in many places there is little or no lowland forest left. Generally speaking they also need a bit of encouragement of the non alcoholic yellow liquid variety on wet sand or mud to start puddling in numbers. The males use the salts to mature their spermatophores for mating, which is why the assemblages are normally males only, and mostly freshly emerged ones. Here's a photo of my wife and some puddling Papilios and Graphiums (with many Graphiums flying around) taken on 26 Feb 2005 in Thabok, Laos. By the time I took this photo I had actually already removed rather a large number of specimens from the assemblage. Most of the Graphiums are doson, with a few eurypylus, antiphates and xenocles, the Papilios in the photo are helenus and nephelus, but many other species are common there too. Adam. Attachments:
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Post by whackk on Jul 30, 2011 20:13:13 GMT -8
I was JUST IN Chiang Mai 2 days ago and people were saying that it has been an unusually wet year without really a dry season, and the people were saying that there were very few scarab beetles compared to previous years. I tried to find out myself if this were true or not and I setup a black-light near my house which was overlooking a densely forested hill. I set this light up at around 6:30 when stag and rhinoceros beetles start flying and kept it up until 10:30. I did this for 5 nights consecutively and found absolutely nothing except for a few noctuid and sphynx moths.
During the days I even hiked through dense rainforest and just found some butterflies. I even happened upon what looked to be banana trees and a lot of the bananas were rotting and yet there were no Cetoniidae beetles.
Then again, it was extremely rainy there, like torrential rain every day so maybe that's the cause to the major absence of beetles.
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Post by Adam Cotton on Jul 31, 2011 0:14:38 GMT -8
That's very strange, we've had a very dry week with hot sunshine most of the day and mostly clear skies at night until last night. There's a tropical storm due to arrive here tonight, and it will probably rain heavily for the next couple of days.
You are right that this year the dry season was much wetter than usual, with lots of drizzly or overcast days in March, and as a result we didn't have the usual serious problem with smoke in the air from all the bushfires and ricefield burnoff that we usually have in March and April. However, the year before was the opposite, no rain from November until mid June, and the stream in my garden ran dry for the first time ever(!!!) with temperatures above 40C in May.
You mention the lack of scarabs, well thats probably because the main season for them doesn't start until at least mid August here. Most of them are adults in August-September, whereas most Lucanids (not all though) are around in May-June. Sounds like you were here too late for the stags and too early for the scarabs!
Adam.
PS. We don't have true rainforest in Chiang Mai, forest below about 1000m is mostly deciduous fire resistant forest which naturally is mainly composed of teak (much of it was chopped down long ago, and is now mostly bamboo and shrubs). Above that is some evergreen forest and another area of dry deciduous forest at the mountaintops (except for the higher mountains 2,000m + which have their own high altitude ecosystems). In certain areas there are pockets of lowland evergreen forest, but these were mostly degraded by human activities long ago, and the only remaining areas are inside national parks.
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Post by lepidofrance on Aug 26, 2011 8:46:10 GMT -8
I just came back from Sabah. In the Crocker Range, I saw very few butterflies fly. It is true that during my three days of presence in this region, it rained a lot. Above all, an entomologist at Kota Kinabalu explained that this year 2011, it had rained almost all the time and, thus, he said, 70% of the larvae were flooded. I stayed mainly in the lowlands of the Kinabatangan where butterflies were flying (but not in large numbers). We could not see these concentration of Papilionidae (mud-puddling) especially as the banks of rivers are muddy and not sandy. Local observers have told me that it could still be further upstream and especially in April-May Among my personal observations (Lowlands): the frequency of P. nephelus albilineatus, P. helenus enganius, P. polytes theseus and less abundant: P. demoleus. Surprising: the extraordinary abundance of Parthenos sylvia: dozens seen every day. Some T. helena mosychlus in less humid areas. Attachments:
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Post by lepidofrance on Aug 26, 2011 8:52:53 GMT -8
From the same hill pictured on the former photo, this butterfly I identify as Prothoe franck borneensis FRUHSTORFER, 1913. Thanks for confirming the ID ! Attachments:
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Post by wollastoni on Aug 29, 2011 3:08:57 GMT -8
Jean-Marc < I love Parthenos sylvia, a fantastic lep. Are the one from Crocker Range very different than those from Tana Toraja (Sulawesi) ? I know that species is very variable.
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Post by lepidofrance on Aug 30, 2011 2:57:17 GMT -8
I did not see a single P. sylvia in the Crocker Range : it was raining ! This butterfly was flying (sunny days) in Poring (Kinalabu mountains) and in the Lowlands (Sepilok, Kinabatangan). As said, dozens seen every days in all kind of biotops (forest, open areas, and so on). Right now, I have not the time to make comparison between my samples from Sulawesi or Thailand or Laos and those from Sabah. The only one point I can say is the following : samples from Sabah are in deed very large, even huge. And as said several times : very, very abundant ! Attachments:
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