Butterfly enthusiasts and lepidopterists are in turmoil following the sudden appearance, in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, of a species called, by its scientific name, the Brephidium thin, the smallest species in all of North America that has also settled in the Persian Gulf in recent years.
While common in the southwestern United States, from California to western Texas and from Mexico to Venezuela, this butterfly made its first appearance in the United Arab Emirates, around 1990, and it then went north to Kuwait.
One theory is that it would have arrived in the UAE in the form of eggs on a specimen of Sesuvium, a succulent desert plant that someone connected with the US State Department may have brought to the Desert Kingdom as a memento of his homeland.
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the Sesuvium, also known as Halimione portulacoides – a plant that also grows wild in the Emirates – is prized by the Brephidium thin, which means that the butterfly likes to leave its eggs there. What it also does on other desert plants present on American territory, in the Persian Gulf or in the Israeli desert. Among these plants, suaeda, the nitraria and the atriplex halimus.
Brephidium thin – the male’s wings are blue on the inside – was first seen in Israel on August 3 by a butterfly lover who was vacationing at a hotel in the Dead Sea. The butterfly stood on a Sesuvium, in the hotel garden.
According to Dr. Oz Ben-Yehuda, a prominent member of the Israel Butterfly Association and a teacher of zoology, ecology and evolution at two academic institutions, no one knows how the species came to Israel. But the living conditions around the Dead Sea are ideal for the Lepidoptera, which has allowed it to establish itself and, already, to multiply.
“Did anyone who went to the United Arab Emirates bring him back? Did he come from the United States? We don’t know, ”he says. “It’s hard to believe that one of them flew over all of Saudi Arabia and Jordan and got here, and laid eggs.”
There are approximately 140 different species of butterflies within the Jewish state.
According to Ben-Yehuva, this unexpected new arrival is only the third species to enter the country from foreign lands.
One arrived before disappearing while the other, Cacyreus marshalli, moved from Africa to Spain, then slowly settling across Europe before entering Israel – possibly from Turkey. No damage to the local ecosystem has been reported either in the case of the Brephidium thin or Cacyreus marshalli, which is now well established in the Jewish state.
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