Butterflies of Ecuador Field Guide

May 2, 2022

The Butterflies of Ecuador ~ A field guide to the most beautiful insects.

Ecuador contains approximately 3000 species in the families Papilionidae, Pieridae, Nymphalidae, Riodinidae, and Lycaenidae, about 50-55% of all Neotropical species in these groups (25% of the World’s species), making it one of the world’s three most diverse countries, along with Colombia and Peru.

Isolation has led to the evolution of endemic higher taxa. Instances are Ithomiinae, Dismorphiinae, Phyciodina, Pyrrhopygini, Eumaeini, Pronophilina, and Eudaminae. Endemic genera (among very many) include Morpho, Agrias, Prepona Caligo, Cithaerias, Catagramma, Parides, Hamadryas, Nessaea, Marpesia, Melanis Mesosemia, Symmachia, Evenus, Memphis, Pierella, and Astraptes.

Ecuador’s Butterfly diversity is directly related to the geography which is dominated by the Andes, bisecting the country on a roughly north-south axis.

The Andes mountain chain provides a barrier separating the western and eastern lowlands, helping to maintain their distinctive faunal characteristics, but also produces a huge range of different habitats for butterflies, like climate, and thus vegetation, which changes from sea-level to over 6000m elevation.

In global terms, biodiversity is not evenly distributed throughout the planet, and it has long been recognized that the tropics generally contain the most diverse biotas.

Within the tropics, it is the forests of South America that contain the richest diversity of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, and probably most large groups of terrestrial organisms.

Montane forests are recognized as one of the most poorly known and severely threatened tropical bioregions, and the Andes are no exception.

Andean forests are small in extent, under increasing threat from explosive population growth, yet incredibly diverse with distinct butterfly faunas restricted to often very narrow altitudinal bands.

While not a biogeographic entity in itself, Ecuador contains an extraordinary range of Andean habitats, within a relatively small geographic area, that are readily accessible.

It encompasses two of only a handful of global hotspot areas, tropical habitats that contain exceptional concentrations of species with high levels of endemism, namely the western Andean Chocó region and western Amazonian uplands along the base of the eastern Andes.

One of the principal Andean faunal boundaries, between the central and northern Andean biogeographic regions, lies in southern Ecuador, while both slopes contain several smaller biogeographic regions containing variably differentiated populations.

**Ecuador Butterfly Watching** in Mindo, Baeza, Tena, Misahualli, and many other locations.

The western slope exhibits one of the most extreme environmental gradients on the continent, changing from pluvial forests with over 6m annual precipitation in the far north, to the dry deciduous woodlands and thorn scrub with less than 30cm annual rainfall in the south, over a distance of 400km.

The first explorers to bring back butterfly specimens from mainland Ecuador were Alexander Von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, in 1802, followed by Clarence Buckley, whose collections laid the foundation of our knowledge of Ecuadorian butterflies.

Buckley, and a succession of nineteenth-century collectors, including Gaujón, de Mathan, Rosenberg, and Haensch, managed to sample all the major regions of Ecuador except the north-east and the south-west Andes and far eastern lowlands, but the central-eastern region was by far the most heavily collected and still remains the best known today.

The most heavily sampled elevations are 400-600m and 1600-2000m on the east, and sea-level to 900m and 1600-2000m on the west, leaving middle and high elevations poorly sampled on both slopes.

Although local commercial dealers have been operating in the central-eastern region since the early 1900s, the next important lepidopterist to work in Ecuador was Frederick M. Brown, who made small collections of high altitude lycaenids and pronophiline satyrines and produced a comprehensive gazetteer of Ecuadorian collecting localities known at that time.

Following a period of inactivity, a small number of lepidopterists have concentrated their field studies on Ecuador

There are a number of species that are expected to occur on the basis of ranges spanning the country or collection very close to a border, and these are listed under species to look for.

In 1993 in Ecuador, a remarkable 616 species were undescribed, about 20% of the total fauna, since then, 347 of these have been described.