Butterfly Record from Salak Mountain, Indonesia

Keanekaragaman kupu-kupu dari Gunung Salak, Indonesia. Penelitian mengenai kupu-kupu telah banyak dilakukan di seluruh dunia, namun informasi basis data tentang kupu-kupu sangat terbatas di Indonesia. Penelitian ini bertujuan mengetahui spesies dari komunitas kupu-kupu yang berada di hutan alam dan habitat sekitarnya di areal Gunung Salak, Taman Nasional Gunung Halimun-Salak, Bogor, Jawa Barat. Pengumpulan data ekologi dilakukan pada bulan September sampai dengan Desember 2003. Survei kupu-kupu dilakukan dengan menggunakan transek sepanjang 200 meter di lima lokasi terpilih yang berbeda. Survei mengumpulkan 237 individu dari 28 spesies yang terdiri dari dari 4 famili. Famili yang paling sering dijumpai adalah Nymphalidae. Pencatatan yang dilakukan menunjukkan bahwa Nymphalidae memiliki jumlah species terbanyak dan kelimpahan individu tertinggi. Dalam tataran species, Melanitis leda adalah spesies dengan kelimpahan tertinggi. Penelitian lebih jauh diperlukan untuk menyediakan informasi yang lebih lengkap tentang komunitas kupu-kupu di daerah ini.


INTRODUCTION
Tropical rainforests are known to harbor the highest diversity of organisms (e.g. Wilson 1988). This is also true for many groups of insects, for example parasitic wasps (Quicke 1997), ants (Brühl 2001), moths (Beck & Schulze 2000;Beck et al. 2002) and butterflies (Schulze et al. 2004). Butterfly is a well studied insect taxon across the world since it is a sensitive insect group to habitat disturbance that plays a very important role in the ecosystem. As tropical country, with thousand of islands, Indonesia is expected to be the home for many species of butterfly; however information on butterfly diversity and its database is very incomplete. Therefore further studies are needed to provide more information to determine the status of butterfly community in Indonesia.
Some investigations have been conducted in several islands and provided valuable published information on several scientific journals including butterfly from Central Sulawesi (Schulze et al. 2004), East Kalimantan (Cleary & Grill 2004;Charrete et al. 2006), Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park (Suharto et al. 2005) and Mount Tangkuban Perahu (Tati-Subahar et al. 2007). Some project reports and books have also recorded butterfly species from a certain area such as butterfly from Button-Sulawesi (Wallace 2004;Winarni & Jones 2007), Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (Nurhasanah et al. 2006), Papua (van Mastrigt & Rosariyanto 2005, Bogor Botanical Garden (Peggie & Amir 2006). This information showed that there is substantially a significant progress of butterfly database development in Indonesia, however much studies are still required to capture more records of butterflies community inhabiting the risky remaining natural habitats. Java is the most populated Island in Indonesia that is now suffering from vast conversion of natural ecosystem due to the increasing rate of land use change. Since many butterfly species are susceptible to the type of environmental change and to the loss of their plant hosts, more investigations are needed to record species list of butterfly before their extinction precedes discovery by human.
Salak Mountain is among the remaining natural ecosystem in Java that is now facing tremendous habitat destruction. Our work in this area was focused on exploring butterfly species inhabiting natural forest and surrounding habitats. This study was the first survey to look at butterfly community living in and around the study area.
Here, we present a preliminary information on butterfly species list recorded by transect walk sampling. We believe that this would be valuable progress of butterfly investigation in Indonesia and would also enrich database information for consideration of conservation strategy of the study area.

Study Area and Study Site
Salak Mountain is located about two hours from the nearest city, Bogor and approximately four hours from the Capital City, Jakarta. The size of the study area was about 31.237 ha covering two districts, Bogor (sub district Ciampea, Ciomas, Cibungbulan) and Sukabumi (Cicurug, Parung Kuda). Previously, the study area was managed by Government state forest company (Perhutani). Rainfall was about 300 mm/month and temperature ranged between 21.2°C and 29.9° with mean of temperature was about C25.7°C (BMG 1997 106°42'25,0''), Jayanegara (S ; 0,6°46'14,0''E ; 106°38'15,3''). Insects were surveyed both in forest and paddy fields in the vicinity of the forest margin.

Sampling
Samplings were conducted between September and December 2003. Insects were surveyed by using sweep net following transect walks along 200 m.
Butterflies were collected using a time-constrained area search during peak flight periods (09.00 to 15.00 hours). Specimens that could not be designated to species in the field were caught with a sweep net and identified subsequently in the laboratory.
The surveys were restricted to condition where the weathers were most favorable for flight.

Specimen Handling and Identification
Butterflies caught from the field were then brought into laboratory for sorting and identification.
All specimens that were brought into the laboratory were handled and mounted using conventional procedures. Dry collections were made by exposing the specimen inside oven for three days. Identification was conducted by reffering to standart references including Morrel (1968), Tsukada (1981Tsukada ( ,1982Tsukada ( ,1985Tsukada ( ,1991.

Data analyses
Sorted and identified specimens were then compiled into MS Exell. Data was not analyzed using specific statistical tool.
Data was not statistically calculated instead of ecologically analyzed.

RESULTS
In total, approximately 237 individual belonging to 26 species and four families were recorded in and around Salak Mountain (24 species collected from forest, 13 species collected from paddy field, 11 species recorded from both forest and paddy field) by surveying five selected locations with two habitat types. Nymphalidae was the most abundant and species rich family, lowest number of individual and species was recorded from Papilionidae with only two singletone species (Graphium evemon and Papilio demolion). Melanitis leda was the species frequentely found in Salak Mountain. Cidahu was recorded to be the most species rich than other selected locations (Gunung Bunder = 9 species, Cidahu = 10 species, Ciapus = 7 species, and Cisarua = 9 species).

DISCUSSION
Our work in Salak Mountain was intended to provide preliminary information on species list of butterfly community instead of measuring diversity. Therefore butterflies were surveyed by using only a single - Total  22  29  42  25  37  19  29  5  24  5 transect walk without replication. Our discussion mostly emphasize on comparison of species richness of the study area and other regions in Java and other islands in Indonesia. Some studies from neighboring countries were also taken into account in this discussion. Our preliminary survey on butterfly community has recorded only 28 species from both forest and surrounding paddy fields. This number is lower than butterfly community recorded in Bromo-Tengger Semeru National Park that identified 31 species (Suharto et al. 2005), but higher than butterfly record in Tangkuban Perahu, West Java with only 23 species (Tati-Subahar et al. 2007).
By comparing those data, it seems that butterfly species in Java was significantly lower than other islands in Indonesia and several neighboring countries. Lower number of butterfly species in Java may relate to several factors: (1) sampling efforts, our work on Butterfly in Salak Mountain and Butterfly record in Bromo-Tengger-Semeru (Suharto et al. 2005) only employed a single transect walk without replication. In contrast, in other studies, sampling effort was higher that is expected to record more species number, (2) habitat destruction, Java is the most populated island in Indonesia where natural habitats are patchily distributed among modified ecosystems. Higher rate of habitat conversion may result in butterfly loss. Comprehensive studies covering a wide variety of taxonomic groups clearly documented that generally forest modification and transformation to land-use systems have a negative effect on diversity and species richness (Lawton et al. 1998) In our samples, Nymphalidae represented the most abundant and the most species family of Butterfly, in contrast Papilionidae was recorded to be very rare. Similar pattern was also documented by Baltazar (1991)