Wiki Loves Butterfly (WLB) is a field documentation and digital conservation initiative run by a dedicated and passionate group of volunteers in India who are deeply enthusiastic about butterflies. Over the course of eight years, the project has made remarkable progress, contributing more than 16,500 high-quality images to Wikimedia Commons and documenting 666 butterfly species and subspecies across diverse ecosystems — including wildlife sanctuaries, tiger reserves, reserve forests, protected areas, butterfly parks, and other biodiversity-rich locations in West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand and North-eastern states of India.
While butterfly remains the core focus, WLB’s extensive fieldwork has naturally led to encounters with other members of the class Insecta. Many team members, being well-versed in related insect groups such as moths and odonates (dragonflies and damselflies), seize the opportunity to document rare or previously unreported species — always ensuring that the primary objective of butterfly documentation remains uncompromised. These incidental findings significantly contribute to the broader scientific understanding of insect biodiversity in the region.
A recent highlight of such interdisciplinary success came during a field expedition in the villages of Keramtar and Rango in the Kalimpong district of West Bengal, India. WLB team members Mr. Subhajit Roy and Mr. Aniruddha Singhamahapatra encountered two very rare dragonfly species — Anisogomphus caudalis (Fraser, 1926a) and Scalmogomphus bistrigatus (Hagen in Selys, 1854). These observations marked the first-ever records of these species from West Bengal, representing a significant milestone in the region’s odonate research. This observation has been published as a scholarly article in the scientific journal named International Journal of Tropical Insect Science on 21 June 2025.
In addition to these notable dragonfly sightings, the team successfully documented a wide array of butterfly species in the same areas, including Flos chinensis (C. & R. Felder, 1865) — Chinese Plushblue, and Sinthusa nasaka amba (Kirby, 1878) – Malayan Narrow Spark, both considered as valued images in Wikimedia commons.
This achievement underscores the broader value of WLB’s work — not just in preserving butterfly diversity but in contributing to the comprehensive understanding of the rich and often overlooked insect fauna of India.
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