Feel the pulse of the ecosystem from the flutter of butterflies

By Lesley D Biswas   Kolkata
11 Oct 2011



The presence of butterflies indicates a healthy ecosystem and to ensure that his City of Joy bathes in a rainbow of flutter, Arjan Basu Roy, the secretary of Nature Mates, a Kolkata based organization working to sensitize people about nature, and the West Bengal Forest Department (WBFD) have developed Banabitan Butterfly Garden in Salt Lake.

Roy has also been associated with other butterfly garden projects to conserve butterflies in eastern India at Suntalekhola, Chilapata Eco-tourism zone and Tiya Bon, all initiatives by the Directorate of Forest, government of West Bengal.

“Butterflies are the most prominent bio-diversity indicators,” points out Roy. “Through them you can understand whether the bio-diversity of a region is secure or not. Where there are butterflies the ecosystem is secure and human beings who comprise the largest component of the ecosystem are not under threat. If butterflies dwindle, mankind will be the worst hit,” he adds.

Butterflies are not merely beautiful fluttering creatures, but are the most prominent bio-diversity indicators, according to Arjan Basu Roy

Luckily, Kolkata is still a rich haven for butterflies with an impressive 120 to 150 species. As a result of Roy’s passion Banabitan Butterfly Garden in Salt Lake’s central park is a pretty colourful maze of butterflies happily frolicking sweet scented nectar plants like lantana, periwinkle, cosmos and hibiscus. Butterflies need larval food plants on which they lay their eggs and caterpillars feed and nectar plants for the butterflies to feed. With species like blue tiger, plain barred owl and more common species like plain and glassy tigers, common yellow and common five rings already visiting, providing them a habitat rich in nectar and host plants make it possible for them to multiply.

Roy’s initiative to conserve butterflies is also working as a catalyst to conserve some of the predators like birds and lizards who feed on butterflies. “We have noticed a steady increase in the mynah, jungle babbler and black drongo,” says Roy, who inherited his appreciation for wildlife from his father Ajoy Basu Roy.

To sustain his family Roy was forced to put his passion on hold and start a printing business. A qualified engineer with three diplomas in engineering including one from the renowned Regional Institute of Printing Technology (RIPT), Roy had no idea then that he was destined for greater things.

Interestingly, Roy’s induction into conservation came accidentally in 2004 when he took an order to print brochures for the WBFD. He came into contact with officials in the forest department who shared a thirst for conserving nature and in July 2005 Roy was included in a project by West Bengal Forest Development Corporation Ltd. to develop Gar Panchakot in Purulia as a destination for traditional herbal treatment.

Though he started out as a wildlife photographer Roy found himself restrained as he could not afford a big lenses camera, imperative for wildlife photography. But, on first May 2005 Roy got an idea. “I was standing in Garpanchkot in Purulia when a beautiful butterfly of the Diana species caught my fancy. The micro-lenses required to photograph butterflies was within my capacity.” And then, as he puts it, “I decided to photograph butterflies and ultimately began conserving them.”

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From slingshot kills to SLR shoots

Sunita Raghu


He might well have been a modern-day Angulimala. Only, instead of people he killed creatures—birds, reptiles and even amphibians. And while the compassion of the Buddha saved Angulimala, for Kolkata-bred Sajal Bar, the road to redemption has been quite different. As a veterinarian and animal activist, his karmic debts, if any, seem to have been repaid in full.


Today, Sajal is the toast of the birding/butterfly/reptile community, a great spotter as they say, and has most certainly come a long way since he played hunter. Ask him when he decided to trade in the slingshot for a camera, and he says, “I killed not for sport, but out of hunger, my family being too poor to keep me well-fed all the time. Hence a good many creatures ended up as my meal—birds, snakes, mongooses, palm civets, water monitors, Indian pond frogs, etc.” Once he killed a male spotted dove during the mating season and the female stayed put near the body. “I was overcome with remorse,” says Sajal. Around that time, well-meaning friends kept dragging him along for birding trips. Soon he joined an NGO called Nature Mates, and his mind was finally opened towards conservation and preservation. Says Sajal, “I owe everything I am today to Bikramadittya G Roy, president of Nature Mates who has taken me under his wing and even funded my expenses.”


Given his hunting background, the stocky 40-year-old’s choice of profession might seem paradoxical, but then again, perhaps it was meant to be. Recollects Sajal, “Once I got two Doberman puppies hoping to raise and sell them for a profit. However, both developed severe diarrhoea and one even succumbed to it for want of a vet who could administer the puppy saline.” Saddened by the loss, Sajal decided to become a vet himself. Easier said than done, considering that he had hardly any education worth the name! However, just by observing and learning under a trained vet, he learnt the ropes of the job. Soon, NGOs were knocking at his door to help save injured animals and even birds. “The other day, I managed to plaster together the broken wing of a Coppersmith Barbet,” he says. Neutering street dogs and cats is another line of work.


His love for nature and photography sees him rising with the birds and going to a nearby forest where he spends time spotting and photographing all living creatures. “Sajal has a keen eye; he is indeed an asset to the birding community,” says his naturalist-friend Arjan Basu Roy. It’s a sentiment shared by avid birder and wildlife photographer Sumit Sen, who feels that Sajal is a good observer of behaviour and patterns and by recording everything, gives an opportunity to others to interpret the same. Vijay Barve, moderator of the e-group ButterflyIndia, says that Sajal is amazingly good at spotting insects and myriad small creatures.


The proudest moment in Sajal’s career must have been when he shot a picture of the Black-browed Reed Warbler in the reed beds of Joka. It was an extraordinary feat, when one considers that prominent American ornithologist Pamela Rasmussen said in her book Birds of South Asia that its presence in India was ‘hypothetical’.



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The butterfly effect

Author(s): Sayantan Bera

Issue: Jul 15, 2011

As India continues to lose its rich butterfly diversity at an alarming rate, a handful of individuals work towards creating newer habitats

Arjan Basu Roy at his laboratory in Kolkata (Photo: Sayantan Bera)If you happen to see a swarm of butterflies flying above the terrace of your office in the crowded Bengaluru city, count yourself lucky. You are witness to the largest annual butterfly migration in southern India. Every year between October and December, swarms of Dark Blue Tiger and Double Branded Brown Crow fly through the Bengaluru-Mysore area to their summer homes in the evergreen forests of Sahyadri in the Western Ghats. There they crowd in dense congregation for weeks, court and breed.
The Western Ghats, along with the Himalayas, the country’s north-east region and the Andaman Islands, are home to butterflies unique to India. With 1,800 known species and subspecies, the country boasts an impressive 10 per cent of the global biodiversity in butterfly.
Butterflies are crucial pollinators and their contribution to global agriculture is valued only next to honey bees. A fall in their population would also lead to a fall in their predator population like the wasps, spiders and birds.
A Harvard butterfly specialist
According to Krushnamegh Kunte, India’s leading lepidopterist and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, habitat destruction and deterioration are the foremost threats to butterfly population. “In India, widespread and excessive use of pesticides and herbicides has exacerbated the problem,” he says. Several intended or unintended human interferences, such as agriculture, fires and dams, alter forest structure and plant composition, or completely destroy butterfly habitats. This has had the most serious impacts in the eastern Himalayas and northeastern India, where butterfly habitats are vanishing at an alarming rate.

Widespread and excessive use of pesticides and herbicides in India has exacerbated the problem       — KRUSHNAMEGH KUNTE, India’s leading lepidopterist

Add to this the thriving illegal trade in butterflies. High altitude species like Kaisar-I-Hind, Bhutan glory, Pale Zezebel and Ladakh Banded Apollo can fetch up to Rs 20,000 in the international market. They are used by collectors to adorn greetings cards, paperweights and jewellery. One can also buy rare species over the Internet. A visit to www.insectdesigns.com can be chilling. Taking advantage of the fact that in most countries other than India, trade in butterflies is legal, the site makes available different varieties priced between US $2 and $330. In India, several cases were reported in the last decade where researchers and tourists from abroad were caught with huge consignments of dead insects, including butterflies. In 2008, for instance, two Czech nationals were caught with 2,000 specimens of larvae and insects collected from the Singalia National Park in north Bengal. The biodiversity hot spots of eastern Himalayas and the Western Ghats are the prime hunting grounds.
In April 2008, on a field trip to Sikkim, Kunte rediscovered the Scare Jester Butterfly—a species protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act implying it enjoys the same level of protection as the tiger. The species was not sighted in the last 90 years and for him the rediscovery emphasised “the need to conserve hitherto unprotected forest fragments as biodiversity parks”. Kunte believes common people can support butterflies. “A native sapling could be planted that butterflies use either as a larval host plant or as a nectar plant—lemons, mangoes, any native caper, pipevine, ficus (relatives of figs). People could maintain a small unattended patch in their gardens or neighbourhoods where wild plants are allowed to grow.”
If you are more ambitious and hardworking, and have some space, you could develop an exclusive butterfly garden, much like what Jyoti and Yashodan Heblekar have done in Goa or Arjan Basu Roy has done in West Bengal.

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Endangered crab falls prey to poachers for medicine testing

Krishnendu Bandyopadhyay, TNN 16 December 2009, 06:31am IST

KOLKATA: Bacteria causing typhoid or meningitis may at times creep into the medicines we use, especially when they are manufactured in unhygienic conditions. The only way to detect them in medicines is to run a check with a particular type of protein Carcinoscorpius Amoebocyte Lysate (CAL) found in the blood cells of horse-shoe crabs, found in the Sunderbans. This blue-blood king crab is on the verge of extinction.

Poachers across the world are targeting this rare species that has its origin much older than the dinosaurs. There is enough evidence that the crab is being smuggled by poachers, who sell them at a high price to drug manufacturers.

A recent study carried out by the marine science department of Calcutta University on these priceless king crabs reveals a sharp decline in the crab population in the Sunderbans, compared to their numbers six years ago. It is because of humans that this species has now been relegated to only certain pockets in the mangrove island, and earned the "highly endangered species" tag.

Smuggling of horse-shoe crabs to foreign shores is rampant, says Abhijit Mitra of the marine science department, as they are in huge demand among leading pharmaceutical companies who do not have easy access to this "wonder animal."

What is so special about this horse-shoe carb? According to Mitra, the Sunderbans variety is a sub-species of the unique Carinoscorpius rotundicauda species, which is found only in Bhitarkanika in Orissa the land of the threatened Olive Ridley turtle. "The extinction of the sub-species will seriously hit drug manufacturing all over the world and would affect the biodiversity of the Sunderbans. The blood of the horseshoe crab provides a valuable medical product critical to maintaining the safety of many drugs and devices used in medical care. It is used to track endotoxins, bacterial substances that often causes high fever that can be fatal," said Mitra.

Continuous poaching by a section of unscrupulous traders of the horseshoe crab may soon deprive domestic drug companies of this bio-active substance. State drug control officials also confirmed the diminishing supply of CAL, used for testing drugs. "There is no harm extracting the blood if one keeps the king crab alive. That is the usual process. The crab is released in the pond after extracting the bio-active substance from its leg. But poachers often kill the creature," a drug control official said.

Bangladesh and Myanmar are the two common smuggling routes, said forest officials. "It is difficult to ascertain which fisherman is catching what," said an official.

Wildlife expert and former forest officer Pranabesh Sanyal said, "The dwindling has been so rapid that the horseshoe crab is now confined to Chemaguri and Jambudwip. In fact, the Jambudwip operation against human settlement was to save horseshoe crab. It is high time that NGOs were involved to stop poaching."

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