Young naturalist Vikas Madhav Nagarajan remarks that when he started the butterfly project along with Banumathi R, Chennai’s very own butterfly lady, in 2015, three goals were etched in stone.
ADVERTISEMENT
Vikas found himself meeting the most elusive of the three goals on April 19 — indirectly and vicariously — when a butterfly record from St Thomas Mount was entered on the iNaturalist platform. iNaturalist is an online citizen-science resource for naturalists to record sightings of a wide variety of species and build a database around them.
Here are the three goals the duo wanted to work towards.
ADVERTISEMENT
One, having a database of the various butterflies from Chennai. Two, hit hundred species. “Today, we are in nice space of 153 species,” reveals Vikas. The third goal was to spot the red Pierrot.
He notes that Way back in 2000, when Bhanumati used to walk in the Guindy National Park, she had seen the red Pierrot. “She was never able to find the slide of that picture, and what we thought was, ‘Okay, since it has been a while, we have to revalidate the species and rediscover it in Chennai. This butterfly has been eluding me for six years (Vikas is now in the United States for higher studies). We have done many programmes, which include visits to the nurseries. Unlike most other butterflies which are slightly more variable about their host plant, the red Pierrot is very specific about it. It is extremely dependent on bryophyllum. Only if you have bryophyllum would you have the red pierrot. Bryophyllum is not a native plant in Chennai, but introduced in gardens. In other cities, notably Bengaluru and Mumbai, you tend to see the red Pierrot in gardens.”
On April 19, a record of a red Pierrot sighting at St Thomas Mount was up on the iNaturalist platform under the Chennai Biodiversity Project, and Vikas reviewed and accepted it. It had been posted by Jomi Jose, who had seen it at St Thomas Mount.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Somewhere nearby, there should have been bryophyllum, and that is my guess,” says Vikas, ading that he makes it a point to spend at least 15 minutes every day to go through the posts at the Chennai biodiversity project.
Vikas reveals he is happy the red Pierrot has been tracked down in Chennai after 22 years, but mildly disappointed that it stood him up for six years (from 2015 to 2021), when he was assiduously looking for it.
“I went all over the metro butterfly-watching, but kept postponing a visit to St. Thomas mount,” laughs Vikas.
ADVERTISEMENT
Jomi did not commit that mistake. In fact, she cannot. Her hearth is in St Thomas Mount, at the foothills of the mount, which is accessible through Butt Road.
A Zoology student from Loyola College and a regular contributor on the iNaturalist platform, Jomi was, unlike Vikas, hardly on the trail of the red Pierrot. The butterfly that had been eluding determined and driven naturalists for 22 years, giving them tiresome run-arounds, “tripped over her doormat”.
“I saw the red Pierrot at my garden where it had alighted on a crepe jasmine plant,” says Jomi, who saw the butterfly on February 11, but entered the sighting in iNaturalist only on April 19. Jomi has no notion of whether bryophyllum is found in the vicinity of her house.
ADVERTISEMENT
Third anniversary
The butterfly project started by Bhanumathi and Vikas in 2015 is subsumed in the Chennai Biodiversity Project (initiated by Vikas, M Yuvan, Mahathi Narayanaswamy and and Rohith Srinivasan), which was launched on April 14, 2019.
“The butterfly project is a subset of the Chennai Biodiversity Project, which even though started in 2019, will take data beyond that, going back in time,” explains Vikas.
Rohith weighs in: “We started this project Biodiversity of Chennai on the Citizen Science platform iNaturalist three years ago to bring more people into the habit of observing the natural world around them and also get them to contribute data to citizen science. This Citizen Science initiative has grown really big over the three years with 3,600 species and 36,000 observations recorded from Chennai.”