Body size and diet breadth drive local extinction risk in butterflies

Anwar Palash; Shatabdi Paul; Sabrina Karim Resha; Md Kawsar Khan

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e10290

Body size and diet breadth drive local extinction risk in butterflies

Heliyon. 2022 Aug 17;8(8):e10290. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e10290. eCollection 2022 Aug.

Authors

Anwar Palash¹, Shatabdi Paul^{2

3

4}, Sabrina Karim Resha¹, Md Kawsar Khan^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Zoology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh.
² Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, 3114, Bangladesh.
³ Department of Biochemistry, Primeasia University, Dhaka, 1213, Bangladesh.
⁴ School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, 2109, Australia.

Abstract

Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths, are significant pollinators and ecosystem health indicators. Therefore, monitoring their diversity, distribution, and extinction risks are of critical importance. We aim to understand drivers of local extinction risks of the butterflies in Bangladesh. We conducted a systematic review to extract local extinction risks of the butterflies of Bangladesh, and possible drivers (e.g., body size and diet breadth) of their extinction. We tested whether body size, larval host plants and adult nectar plants contribute to the local extinction risks of butterflies. We predicted butterflies with larger body size and fewer host and nectar plants would be in greater extinction risk. We showed extinction risk is higher in larger butterflies than smaller butterflies, and in butterflies with fewer number of host and nectar plants than the butterflies with higher number host and nectar plants. Our study identifies body size and diet breadth as a potential driver of the local extinction of butterflies thereby suggesting larger conservation urgency for the larger butterflies with narrow diet breadth.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Conservation; Diet breadth; Extinction; Insects; South Asia.