Occasional photographic records of butterflies ( Lepidoptera , Papilionoidea ) in Cambodia . 1 . The coastal Cardamom foothills ( SW Cambodia ) , 2010-2018

Results are presented of occasional photographic records of butterflies (Lepidoptera, Papilionoidea) made along with studies on the Odonata fauna in 63 localities of four coastal provinces of SW Cambodia (Koh Kong, Preah Sihanouk, Kampot and Kep) in 2010-2018. In total, 151 identified and 15 provisionally identified species are listed; 39 identified species (Troides helena, Graphium agetes, Prioneris philomone, Abisara echerias, Arhopala abseus, A. aedias, A. aida, A. alitaeus, A. atosia, A. avatha, A. bazaloides, A. elopura, Cigaritis lohita, Sinthusa nasaka, Lampides boeticus, Udara selma, Zizeera karsandra, Danaus affinis, Euploea phaenareta, Parantica agleoides, Cyrestis themire, Euthalia malaccana, E. phemius, Discophora timora, Lethe mekara, Badamia exclamationis, Burara harisa, Odina decorata, Tagiades menaka, Ancistroides nigrita, Gangara lebadea, Halpe zola, Hyrtaotis adrastus, Lotongus calathus, Matapa aria, M. sasivarna, Pirdana hyela, Suastus minutus, Thoressa masoni) and 8 provisionally identified species (Poritia cf. erycinoides, Nacaduba cf. pavana, ?Cephrenes acalle, Erionota cf. torus, Halpe cf. hauxvillei, Notocrypta cf. clavata, Potanthus cf. subochraceus, ?Polytremis lubricans) are for the first time reported for Cambodia. These, as well as some other provisionally identified and unidentified species are illustrated. The only not so expected record is a Sondaic species Arhopala athada.


Introduction
Butterflies are creatures traditionally attracting much attention, of public because of their doubtless aesthetic value as well as of scientists since their assemblages are useful indicators of habitat quality.Cambodia still retains large but fast shrinking areas of primary and moderately disturbed tropical forests (of which most important are lowland forests, chiefly exterminated elsewhere) which must be reach in butterflies.Paradoxically, its butterfly fauna is worst known among the countries of Indochina and, broadly, of the Indomalayan area.In recent decades, only four papers appeared: three reports of the trips by Hiraoki Onodera to the northern and eastern Cambodia (Onodera, 2007;2008;2009a) and a report of a detailed study of butterflies (except for Hesperiidae) of the Phom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary in the Cambodian Cardamoms by Monastyrskii, Yago, & Odagiri (2011), as well as a popular atlas of the butterflies of South-Western Cambodia, chiefly focusing at Botum Sokor Natilnal Park (Woodfield & Murton, 2006).On dot maps of distribution of even many most common and widespread species presented at the site 'A Check List of Butterflies in Indo-China' by Yutaka Inayoshi (2018), the Cambodian territory looks as a white spot between the territories of Thailand and Vietnam, which are dotted quite densely.No checklist of Cambodian butterflies is published, but Inayoshi (2018) summarised at his site all faunistic information concerning butterflies of Thailand and Indochina, available to him personally and published in scientific literature (although the Cambodian records of many species made by Monastyrskii et al. (2011) are still missed).
No doubt, the knowledge of the Cambodian butterflies will gain with time, but the rate of deforestation of the country is frighteningly high, so that the current speed of extermination of butterfly habitat may have already exceeded ISSN 2412-1908; http://journal.asu.ru/biol the speed of their study.Meanwhile the knowledge of this group is very important just for the purposes of nature conservation for the two above given reasons: the human love to these beautiful creatures and their conspicuous manifestation of the habitat quality.In this respect, any new and even preliminary knowledge of butterfly species composition and distribution are welcome.Photographical data can be considered as such.Butterflies are very popular object of wildlife photography.With their rich, elaborate and as a rule species specific wing pattern, butterflies are among creatures most likely identifiable by photographs.Nevertheless, many of their groups, especially in Hesperiidae, have very similar or identical wing patterns and are identifiable only by male genitalia, that makes them the least investigated and hence most interesting.Among Cambodian butterflies, most representatives of quite a number of speciose genera, e.g.Melanitis, Mycalesis, Ypthima, Potanthus, cannot be identified by the wing pattern while identification (especially by only one wing side) of many species in the genera Miletus Hübner, [1819], Allotinus C. & R. Felder, [1865], Arhopala Boisduval, 1832, Jamides Hübner, [1819], Nacaduba Moore, [1881], Prosotas Druce, 1891, some Euploea Fabricius, 1807 etc. and the whole family Hesperiidae is problematic.Although all photographic records should be considered as preliminary, to be once proved by voucher specimens, they worth publishing with a relevant degree of caution, as a certain step of revealing so insufficiently known butterfly fauna of Cambodia.Some photographs of interesting insects could even inspire special directed studies.
Since 2006, I have been conducting field faunistic studies of dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) of Cambodia and to the present moment have made eleven, mostly 2-3 week long, trips to that country.Although my attention was mostly absorbed by dragonflies and damselflies, I used to occasionally photograph some butterflies along with my main activity.I tried to make the faunal data on Odonata of Cambodia published soon after their being obtained but this was hardly possible for butterflies, which are much more speciose and not my main research subject.To get started, in this report I summarised the faunal data from butterfly photos made in the four provinces of SW Cambodia, Koh Kong, Preah Sihanouk, Kampot and Kep Provinces, occupying the coastal foothills of the Cardamom Mts., where I have nearly completed my very preliminarily odonatological survey.

Methods
The butterflies were photographed in the wild in purely natural conditions, without any restriction of their freedom and mobility, using the Olympus Camedia C8080 camera, since 2014 also using the Canon EOS 350D camera with Sigma AF 24-70 mm F2.8 EX DG Macro lens and, rarely, the Pentax WG-10 camera.As few as ten specimens in total were occasionally collected (indicated in the text) and kept in Siberian Zoological Museum at the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals SB RAS, Novosibirsk.Coordinates were obtained with Garmine eTrex H personal GPS navigator and revised using Google Earth; elevations were retrieved from Google Earth.

Identification and taxonomy
The taxonomic system used in the site 'A Check List of Butterflies in Indo-China' (Inayoshi, 2018) is adopted, but more subfamilies are recognised.
The butterflies on the photos were mostly identified using the comprehensive book on the butterfly fauna of the adjacent Thailand (Ek-Amnuay, 2006), with corrigenda (Ek-Amnuay et al., 2007), the internet site 'A Check List of Butterflies in Indo-China' (Inayoshi, 2018) and some more specific sources, e.g. a paper on Riodininae of Vietnam (Callaghan, 2009).Of great (critical) use were the papers by Hiraoki Onodera on the butterflies of Cambodia (Onodera, 2007;2008;2009a) and Laos (Onodera, 2009b;2015) and his unpublished reports on the butterflies of Laos, kindly provided by the author.Useful hints came from internet sites 'The Thailand Butterflies Species Gallery' by Antonio Giudici (2018) and 'Gee's Nature Tours ' by Gerard Chartier (2018).For identifications of some difficult cases, at different time and different sets of photos, I consulted Leslie Day, Antonio Giudici and Gerard Charter.They confirmed most, suggested some, kindly corrected others and wisely refrained from decisions on many, so all responsibility for identifications is mine.
Most of the photos were identified to species.Many identifications are provisional; these are indicated with 'cf'.With very few exceptions indicated below, no subspecies identification was attempted but, since subspecies of Oriental butterflies as a rule have distinct geographical ranges, each species was formally attributed to a biogeographically relevant subspecies according to Inayoshi (2018).
All the photos are available for critical consideration as presented at my internet site (Kosterin, 2018).

Abbreviations and designations
The abbreviations standard across the butterfly literature is used: FW and HW -fore and hind wing, respectively, UPS and UNS -upperside of both wings, respectively, UPF, UPH, UNF and UNH -upperside of fore and hind wing and underside of fore and hind wing, respectively; vein 3 is the first cubitus upper branch, vein 4 is the median third branch; the numeration of spaces follows the standard English system (see e.g.Ek-Amnuay, 2006).
Most of the here presented data refer to coastal lowlands and lower foothills.These relief positons had been mostly devoid of natural habitats long ago in the neighbouring continental Thailand but largely retained them in Cambodia until the time of my study, being fast exterminated right now.Unfortunately, most the butterfly diversity outlined will soon be lost and all these data may become more useful as comparative historical rather than actual data, since the loss of natural habitats in Cambodia driven by unlimited and unrestricted Chinese investments, even in the so-called 'national parks, is going proceed with the same tempo as presently.For instance, the author had witnessed nearly complete extermination of the unique lowland evergreen tropical forest in what is still called Preah Sihanouk Ream National Park, which took place between spring 2017 and autumn 2018, as well as extermination of peat moss mires at the Bokor Hill Station between 2010 and 2015 in Preah Monivong National Park.
The richest locality appeared to be one of the most inland of those (43 km NE of the sea), 30\Microgomphus River (visited five times), a medium-sized river bordering the pristine evergreen forest and fruit plantations at 340-350 m a.s.l.6.5 km SW Thma Bang village.As many as 38 species were recorded there, 8 of which (C. roxus, I. helicon, N. cf.berenice, N. cf.pavana, U. usta, J. iphita, E. malaccana, M. faunula) were found (photographed and seen) only there.
The hills and mountains of the examined areas are formed almost exclusively by sandstone, and only the hill in Kep by limestone; no igneous rocks.Among the localities examined, only those on the famous Bokor Plateau (55\Bokor Slope, 54\Bokor Hill Station, 53\Bokor Mire, 52\Idionyx Reach, 51\Popokvil Waterfall) were elevated at ~900-1070 m a.s.l. and offered such peculiar habitats as misty low montane forest and peat-moss mires.They were examined at Bokor Hill Station still nearly pristine, before extermination in 2011-2014.Curiously, they were poor in butterflies, with their set generally looking as an impoverished lowland fauna.However, such butterflies as S. nasaka, U. selma, K. inachus, T. diores.T. menaka and Pyroneura sp. were found only there.
Photorgaphic data on butterflies obtained by me in some inland Provinces of Cambodia will hopefully be published in due course.
There exist much more photographic data on Cambodian butterflies.Gerard Chartier, a passionate naturalist and a resident of Tatai Commune in Koh Kong Province, accumulated a great lot of butterfly photographic records from the vicinity of his place.These data (Chartier, 2018), comprising an uniquely comprehensive assessment of a local fauna of a little-disturbed area of evergreen tropical low hill rainforest transiting to lowland evergreen forest, marshes and mangroves, for some reason await publication for years.At present the butterflies are the popular subject of citizen science in Cambodia.Their numerous photographs are being posted, mostly by Eddie Smith, an eager insect photographer at Siem Reap, to the Facebook group 'Natural Cambodia' (and quite a number of them have been posted to the presently dormant group 'Cambodian Insects), to be hopefully summarised and published some day by some butterfly enthusiast.Social networks are far from being a good place for accumulating scientific data but can serve as their transitory reservoir, and we can only pray for these informational treasures, whatever be the obvious limitation of ther precision by the photographic method, to be eventually become available to scientific community through relevant publication.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.Disposition of localities where butterfly photos were taken in the coastal provinces of Cambodia.The numerals correspond to those used for the localities in the text.