| Abstrakt: |
AbstractCuc Phuong National Park, located 130 km south of Hanoi, extends into the 3 provinces of Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa and Hoa Binh. It gives a good impression of how lowland Vietnam must have looked before the extensive deforestation of the past 150 years and earlier. The Park attracts 50,000 visitors a year, a tenth of which are foreign visitors. Butterflies - often in amazing quantities - are one of the main memories that any visitor to the park brings back. The butterfly fauna is estimated to be about 500 species, about half the total butterfly species in VietNam and more than the entire butterfly fauna of Europe or Australia (about 400 each). The aim of the paper is to show the diversity of butterflies in Cuc Phuong, how this reflects the biogeographical changes in the region over the past 50-100 million years, behaviour patterns such as mimicry, camouflage, massing, host-plant relationships and the importance of the Cuc Phuong butterflies as environmental indicators. |
