New species of butterfly discovered in Colombia

December 2007. A new butterfly species, found only in the high Andes of South America, has been discovered by a scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. Idioneurula donegani is a small to medium-sized coffee-brown butterfly with eyespots on its hind wings, from the highest peaks in Colombia’s Serrania de los Yariguies. The butterfly was discovered during the first exploration of the area, which led to the creation of a national park in the region by the Colombian government.

 

Blanca Huertas, butterfly curator at the Natural History Museum, who discovered and described the new species said, ‘This is an amazing discovery. Butterflies are a diverse group of insects with almost 20,000 known species, 40 per cent of which are in South America. We have been to almost every corner of the world and although some remote parts of the Neotropical region remain unexplored, we only occasionally discover a new species.’

 

To survey the Serrania de los Yariguíes, Huertas, her team and their equipment were dropped by helicopter on to an isolated peak at 3,000 metres above sea level. This was the first time parts of the highest elevations of the 100 kilometre-long mountain range have been explored. Butterflies were examined and compared to specimens held in the Museum’s collections, which include more than 7,000 species of butterflies from South America. Molecular analysis of DNA collected from the butterflies in the field has also revealed that I. donegani is a separate species.

 

‘New finds like this encourage us to keep exploring the world’, continued Blanca Huertas. ‘We have only recently explored the mountain where we found I. donegani. Other remote and unexplored mountains like the Yariguíes could have other species that remain undiscovered. We are privileged at the Natural History Museum to have one of the largest butterfly collections in the world. We look after 28 million insects here, which include around three million butterflies.’

The paper describing the new species was published this month in the prestigious international journal Zootaxa.

The name donegani is dedicated to Thomas Donegan, EBA project director and pioneer of the expeditions to Serranía de los Yariguíes.

 

The EBA (Evaluation of Biodiversity in the Andes) and YARE (Yariguíes Assessment and Research of Endangered species) expeditions to the Yariguíes were supported by the BP Conservation Programme, BirdLife International, Conservation International, Flora & Fauna International, Wildlife Conservation Society, Rio Tinto plc, Duke of Edinburgh, the Royal Geographical Society, Fundación ProAves and many other Colombian institutions. The results from these expeditions have been essential in the creation of a 200,000 hectare national park in the region by the Colombian government last year.