Abstract
The present study was conducted at Gangajalghati, a village near the forest of Bankura district from West Bengal that has a tropical wet and dry climate where moth diversity has not been explored before. The village was surveyed between January 2016 and December 2018. The present study has recorded a total of 1,328 individual moths belonging to 13 families, 31 subfamilies, 80 genera, and 90 species. Three species—Condylorrhiza diniasalis (Walker, 1859), Argyrocosma inductaria (Guenée, 1858), and Oraesia emarginata (Fabricius, 1794)—are reported for the first time from West Bengal and Eublemma roseonivea (Walker, 1863) shows its westernmost distribution in West Bengal, India. It was earlier reported from India (Assam), China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaya, and Borneo.
Highlights
IntroductionMoths constitute the vast majority of the insect order Lepidoptera and are present in all the continents except polar regions
Maximum species richness was recorded from the family Erebidae (31 species; 27 genera) followed by Crambidae (27 species; 24 genera), Sphingidae, Geometridae, Noctuidae, Notodontidae, and others (Figure 2; Table 4)
Only 11 moth species had been reported from the Bankura district; Acherontia styx (Westwood, 1847), Asota caricae (Fabricius, 1775), Creatonotos gangis (Linnaeus, 1763), Creatonotos transiens (Walker, 1855), Diaphania indica (Saunders, 1851), Eilema vicara (Strand, 1922), Macroglossum gyrans (Walker, 1856), Scirpophaga incertulas (Walker, 1863), Theretra oldenlandiae (Fabricius, 1775), Theretra silhetensis (Walker, 1856), and Trabala vishnou (Lefèbvre, 1827) (Bhattacharya 1997b; Ghosh & Chaudhury 1997a,b; Mandal & Maulik 1997)
Summary
Moths constitute the vast majority of the insect order Lepidoptera and are present in all the continents except polar regions. This important component of biodiversity serves as nocturnal pollinators, herbivores of crops and wild plants, and food for numerous species of rodents, birds, and bats (Bates et al 2014). Detecting, describing, and interpreting the results of an inventory of fauna from a specific region almost always remains a challenging task and the primary data collected in such studies can be used for the analysis by environmental agencies (Silveira et al 2010). Documentation of species occurrence records in a data-poor but biodiversity-rich region like Bankura is important for determining the species distribution and abundance of the district which contribute significantly to the knowledge base of local biodiversity. Small-area inventories of relatively immobile or readily detected organisms from an unexplored region may provide both reliable presence and absence information of a species, but usually with limited spatial or temporal specificity (Jetz et al 2019)
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